Nearly all external solid-state drives are small enough to slip into a shirt pocket, but not all can survive a dust storm or a 30-minute immersion in three feet of water.
CalDigit's 512GB Tuff Nano ($149.95) can, and it includes extras that other manufacturers often fail to provide, such as a plastic case that both adds protection and provides storage for its USB Type-A and Type-C cables (much nicer than some vendors' cheesy and easy-to-lose USB-A-to-C dongles).
But its cost of about 29 cents per gigabyte is prohibitive—it's still steep even at 25 cents per gigabyte if you buy the gadget from Amazon.
It's an attractive piece of kit, but the Tuff Nano falls short of the top spot in our roundup of the best ruggedized drives.
Choose Your Color
Measuring 0.6 by 3 by 2.1 inches, the Tuff Nano weighs in at 2.6 ounces.
Most of the heft, no doubt, is due to the design that gives this NVMe-based drive an Ingress Protection (IP) rating of IP67, letting it shrug off everything from 3-meter drops to the half-hour swim I mentioned earlier.
(If you'd like to know more about ruggedization ratings, see our explainer.)
Besides the abovementioned carrying case for the drive and cables (reminiscent of an old-school game cartridge or 8mm videotape case, if you're of a certain age and feeling nostalgic), the drive itself wears a rubber bumper available in charcoal black, olive green, royal blue, or tomato red.
The bumper is easily removed, if you wish, but doing so will reduce the shockproofing.
More important, removal will expose the Tuff Nano's USB-C port, eliminating its waterproofing.
If you do remove and then reinstall the bumper, note that it takes some care to ensure that the rubber stopper that protects the USB-C port is correctly positioned.
While CalDigit's inclusion of USB-A and USB-C cables is greatly appreciated, the company doesn't provide any utility software: If you intend to use the drive for backup and restore purposes, you'll need to supply your own apps.
The Tuff Nano also comes formatted for use with macOS computers, so Windows users will want to reformat before use—easy enough to do, and the only setup required.
Utility software is definitely not a necessity, especially since many users will use the drive for video or audio storage or streaming rather than for backups.
However, at this price, it would have been nice if CalDigit had provided additional value-adds—perhaps some cloud storage or maybe a trial subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps.
As long as I'm picking nits, another thing that's missing is some sort of LED activity indicator.
In its absence, given an SSD's silent operation, one has no way of knowing that data is being written to or read from the drive.
Performance Testing
The Tuff Nano's read and write speeds proved more than adequate (and far faster than those of a hard drive, of course), but nothing extraordinary for its class.
Of four recently tested SSDs, the Nano proved to be the slowest behind the ADATA SE800, the Crucial X8, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro.
To be fair, it wasn't much slower than the others, and it was notably faster than the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO that we tested a few months ago.
That detail about the internal workings of the drives is a key thing to note.
All of the drives tested below support a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, but the four recently tested ones (this one, the ADATA, the Crucial, and the SanDisk) use PCI Express internals (drives, controllers, and bridging silicon) that allow for speeds faster than what you'd see from typical earlier external SSDs that rely on SATA drives, controllers, and bridges.
Drives of the latter (SATA) provenance will typically see sequential reads and writes peak between 450MB and 550MB per second.
You'll see this especially on the Crystal DiskMark tests when comparing drives with PCI Express and SATA innards.
So, in short: The CalDigit performs in the range for its class, and it is an upgrade over earlier pre-PCI Express external SSDs in terms of speed.
BlackMagic 3.1 Disk Speed Test
Blackmagic is a Mac-only utility used to measure drive performance.
Created by an Australian producer of video software and hardware, the test is often used to help videographers determine how a drive would perform when loading, saving, or streaming large video files, and is an excellent way to see how a drive handles very large files of any type.
In this test, the Tuff Nano turned in slower read and write speeds than most of the other SSDs tested, though not by much.
Plugged into a 2016 MacBook Pro, the Nano's read speeds of 916MBps and write speeds of 763MBps trailed its competitors (though they blew away the HyperX drive's), but were quite close to CalDigit's advertised transfer speeds in the 1,000MBps range.
Daxdi Drag-and-Drop Test
In this venerable test, we copy a 1.2GB test folder containing several different file types to the external SSD, with a stopwatch telling us how long the transfer takes.
This offers a good real-world check on transfer speeds.
As with the BlackMagic test above, the Tuff Nano was slower than the other SSDs tested except for the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO (and it wasn't much quicker than that unit).
It took roughly twice as long to complete the transfer task as the speedy ADATA SE800 and SanDisk Extreme Pro did.
PCMark 8
PCMark 8 has a storage test that measures the performance of a drive in simulations of everyday workloads such as videoconferencing and word processing.
In this test, all five of the drives performed similarly, with the Tuff Nano barely edging out the ADATA and HyperX.
Note that the Nano was outperformed by the Crucial X8 and SanDisk Extreme Pro, but not by enough to matter.
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal DiskMark's sequential read/write tests measure the performance of a drive by reading and writing large, contiguous blocks of data.
Again, the CalDigit SSD generated scores similar to those of the Crucial, SanDisk, and ADATA and much better than those of the HyperX Savage EXO.
The Tuff Nano's read speed in this test of 957Mbps was quite close to the manufacturer's claim of up to 1,055Mbps, while its write speed of 920MBps actually topped CalDigit's promise of up to 900Mbps.
Sturdy But Pricey
The Tuff Nano is well-made, and its aluminum case, rugged innards, and IP67 rating give the SSD the sort of heft that reassures those of us who worry about our data.
CalDigit also earns extra points for its provision of a plastic carrying case and dual USB cables.
But its cost, combined with a shorter warranty than many other manufacturers' (two years as opposed to three or more), make this appealing drive a less than compelling purchase.
We recommend the 1TB ADATA SE800, whose cost per gigabyte is also on the high side but which offers a fractionally higher IP68 rating, downloadable utility software, an LED activity light, and an extra year of warranty.
Pros
Slim and sleek, with an anodized aluminum case and rubber bumpers.
USB-A and USB-C cables included, as well as a convenient plastic case.
The Bottom Line
Its IP67 dust-, shock-, and waterproof rating makes the CalDigit Tuff Nano SSD definitely tough enough, and you get a handy plastic case as well as USB-A and USB-C cables, but the external drive's pluses aren't enough to outweigh its high cost per gigabyte and ordinary performance.
Nearly all external solid-state drives are small enough to slip into a shirt pocket, but not all can survive a dust storm or a 30-minute immersion in three feet of water.
CalDigit's 512GB Tuff Nano ($149.95) can, and it includes extras that other manufacturers often fail to provide, such as a plastic case that both adds protection and provides storage for its USB Type-A and Type-C cables (much nicer than some vendors' cheesy and easy-to-lose USB-A-to-C dongles).
But its cost of about 29 cents per gigabyte is prohibitive—it's still steep even at 25 cents per gigabyte if you buy the gadget from Amazon.
It's an attractive piece of kit, but the Tuff Nano falls short of the top spot in our roundup of the best ruggedized drives.
Choose Your Color
Measuring 0.6 by 3 by 2.1 inches, the Tuff Nano weighs in at 2.6 ounces.
Most of the heft, no doubt, is due to the design that gives this NVMe-based drive an Ingress Protection (IP) rating of IP67, letting it shrug off everything from 3-meter drops to the half-hour swim I mentioned earlier.
(If you'd like to know more about ruggedization ratings, see our explainer.)
Besides the abovementioned carrying case for the drive and cables (reminiscent of an old-school game cartridge or 8mm videotape case, if you're of a certain age and feeling nostalgic), the drive itself wears a rubber bumper available in charcoal black, olive green, royal blue, or tomato red.
The bumper is easily removed, if you wish, but doing so will reduce the shockproofing.
More important, removal will expose the Tuff Nano's USB-C port, eliminating its waterproofing.
If you do remove and then reinstall the bumper, note that it takes some care to ensure that the rubber stopper that protects the USB-C port is correctly positioned.
While CalDigit's inclusion of USB-A and USB-C cables is greatly appreciated, the company doesn't provide any utility software: If you intend to use the drive for backup and restore purposes, you'll need to supply your own apps.
The Tuff Nano also comes formatted for use with macOS computers, so Windows users will want to reformat before use—easy enough to do, and the only setup required.
Utility software is definitely not a necessity, especially since many users will use the drive for video or audio storage or streaming rather than for backups.
However, at this price, it would have been nice if CalDigit had provided additional value-adds—perhaps some cloud storage or maybe a trial subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps.
As long as I'm picking nits, another thing that's missing is some sort of LED activity indicator.
In its absence, given an SSD's silent operation, one has no way of knowing that data is being written to or read from the drive.
Performance Testing
The Tuff Nano's read and write speeds proved more than adequate (and far faster than those of a hard drive, of course), but nothing extraordinary for its class.
Of four recently tested SSDs, the Nano proved to be the slowest behind the ADATA SE800, the Crucial X8, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro.
To be fair, it wasn't much slower than the others, and it was notably faster than the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO that we tested a few months ago.
That detail about the internal workings of the drives is a key thing to note.
All of the drives tested below support a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, but the four recently tested ones (this one, the ADATA, the Crucial, and the SanDisk) use PCI Express internals (drives, controllers, and bridging silicon) that allow for speeds faster than what you'd see from typical earlier external SSDs that rely on SATA drives, controllers, and bridges.
Drives of the latter (SATA) provenance will typically see sequential reads and writes peak between 450MB and 550MB per second.
You'll see this especially on the Crystal DiskMark tests when comparing drives with PCI Express and SATA innards.
So, in short: The CalDigit performs in the range for its class, and it is an upgrade over earlier pre-PCI Express external SSDs in terms of speed.
BlackMagic 3.1 Disk Speed Test
Blackmagic is a Mac-only utility used to measure drive performance.
Created by an Australian producer of video software and hardware, the test is often used to help videographers determine how a drive would perform when loading, saving, or streaming large video files, and is an excellent way to see how a drive handles very large files of any type.
In this test, the Tuff Nano turned in slower read and write speeds than most of the other SSDs tested, though not by much.
Plugged into a 2016 MacBook Pro, the Nano's read speeds of 916MBps and write speeds of 763MBps trailed its competitors (though they blew away the HyperX drive's), but were quite close to CalDigit's advertised transfer speeds in the 1,000MBps range.
Daxdi Drag-and-Drop Test
In this venerable test, we copy a 1.2GB test folder containing several different file types to the external SSD, with a stopwatch telling us how long the transfer takes.
This offers a good real-world check on transfer speeds.
As with the BlackMagic test above, the Tuff Nano was slower than the other SSDs tested except for the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO (and it wasn't much quicker than that unit).
It took roughly twice as long to complete the transfer task as the speedy ADATA SE800 and SanDisk Extreme Pro did.
PCMark 8
PCMark 8 has a storage test that measures the performance of a drive in simulations of everyday workloads such as videoconferencing and word processing.
In this test, all five of the drives performed similarly, with the Tuff Nano barely edging out the ADATA and HyperX.
Note that the Nano was outperformed by the Crucial X8 and SanDisk Extreme Pro, but not by enough to matter.
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal DiskMark's sequential read/write tests measure the performance of a drive by reading and writing large, contiguous blocks of data.
Again, the CalDigit SSD generated scores similar to those of the Crucial, SanDisk, and ADATA and much better than those of the HyperX Savage EXO.
The Tuff Nano's read speed in this test of 957Mbps was quite close to the manufacturer's claim of up to 1,055Mbps, while its write speed of 920MBps actually topped CalDigit's promise of up to 900Mbps.
Sturdy But Pricey
The Tuff Nano is well-made, and its aluminum case, rugged innards, and IP67 rating give the SSD the sort of heft that reassures those of us who worry about our data.
CalDigit also earns extra points for its provision of a plastic carrying case and dual USB cables.
But its cost, combined with a shorter warranty than many other manufacturers' (two years as opposed to three or more), make this appealing drive a less than compelling purchase.
We recommend the 1TB ADATA SE800, whose cost per gigabyte is also on the high side but which offers a fractionally higher IP68 rating, downloadable utility software, an LED activity light, and an extra year of warranty.
Pros
Slim and sleek, with an anodized aluminum case and rubber bumpers.
USB-A and USB-C cables included, as well as a convenient plastic case.
The Bottom Line
Its IP67 dust-, shock-, and waterproof rating makes the CalDigit Tuff Nano SSD definitely tough enough, and you get a handy plastic case as well as USB-A and USB-C cables, but the external drive's pluses aren't enough to outweigh its high cost per gigabyte and ordinary performance.
