ToughTech Duo Overview
The ToughTech Duo is a rather small device, the actual dimensions are 89mm x 159mm x 34mm. As you can guess by the photos below the entire enclosure is made of aluminum. This means not only is it going to protect your drives it is going to keep them cool as well.
On the front of the enclosure there is a large LCD, 3 indication LED’s, and 4 buttons. The LCD is for easy monitoring of your drives and to set the configuration for the drives.
on the left side of the enclosure are all of your connections. From left to right you have FireWire, SATA / USB and power. Right above the power connection you have a small on/off button. On the actual top of the drive is a small Kessington lock port.
You will find the drive bays on the right side of the drive. The ToughTech Duo supports 2.5-inch hard drives. There are indication LED’s for both of the drive bays. In the center of each drive bay is a slider that will unlock the drive. When you unlock the drive you can press it in and the tray will easily pull out. Our ToughTech Duo has already came with drives installed. CRU-DataPort actually offers 3 different versions of the ToughTech Duo, just the enclosure, dual 250GB drives and dual 750GB drives. Also there are Mac and Windows versions. The Mac versions are formatted to HFS+ whereas the Windows versions are formatted to NTFS. The drives installed are Seagate Momentus 750GB 2.5-inch drives.
There is also a stand that comes with the enclosure so you can mount it vertically if you want.
This is junk. I have the USB 3 unit. I continually find mine overheating, causing a system error and also having me have to rebuild one of the drives. The rebuilds take 5-8 hours. I thought this drive was going to be my answer to backing up my photos while on location. Instead it has been a nightmare and a waste of money. I no longer trust this unit at all. It’s not much of a space saving device if you have to carry a large fan around with it.