First we loaded six pictures onto the hard drive to confirm that no corruption occurred during the burning process.

To test this disaster proof enclosure we put it in a fire for 30 minutes (the Solo is rated to withstand 1550º F/843º C for 30 minutes). The fire was fueled using common building materials to emulate the heat of a building fire. We then put out the fire with a common garden hose.

After being in the fire for 30 minutes and being doused with water we extracted the hard drive from the enclosure and allowed it to cool to room temperature. Once cooled it was plugged into our computer and accessed to verify that it was still operational.

This video shows exactly how we tested. The burn stage is not completely shown in the video to keep the video short.

As you can see in the video the hard drive survived our test and all the data on the drive was intact.

As for performance, we tested it using HDTune and Diskspeed32, achieving an average transfer rate of 34.4 MB/s and 31 MB/s, respectively. This is a low performance compared to what a hard drive can achieve when connected directly on the motherboard, but similar to other USB 2.0 devices. An eSATA port would be a nice addition to improve the performance of the product.