CalDigit Tuff Nano

amazon CalDigit Tuff Nano reviews

Its IP67 dust, shock, and water-resistant rating make the CalDigit Tuff Nano SSD sturdy enough, and you’ll get a handy plastic case as well as USB-A and USB-C cables. Still, the drive’s plus external disks are not enough to outweigh the high cost per gigabyte and typical 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 dip in the water. CalDigit’s 512GB Tuff Nano ($149.95) can include extras that other manufacturers don’t typically offer. Such as a plastic case that enhances protection and offers storage for USB Type-A and Type-C cables (much nicer than some ‘luxury and easy-lost USB-A-to-C protector’ vendors). But the cost of about 29 cents per gigabyte is steep – it’s still high even at 25 cents per gigabyte if you buy the device from Amazon.

Choose your color

Measuring 0.6 x 3 x 2.1 inches, the Tuff Nano weighs 2.6 ounces. Undoubtedly, much of the power comes from the design that gives this NVMe-based drive an Ingress Protection (IP) rating of IP67, allowing it to drop anything from 3 meters to a swish half-hour swim that I mentioned earlier.

Besides the carrying mentioned above case for the drive and cables, the drive itself also wears A rubber pad is available in charcoal black, olive green, blue, or tomato red. The case can be easily removed if you want, but doing so reduces impact resistance. More importantly, the removal exposes the Tuff Nano’s USB-C port, eliminating waterproofing. If you remove and then reinsert the case, note that care should be taken to ensure that the rubber stopper securing the USB-C port is in place.

While CalDigit’s inclusion of USB-A and USB-C cables is appreciated, the company doesn’t provide any utility software: If you plan to use the drive for backup and restore purposes, you will need to provide your app. Tuff Nano is also formatted for use with macOS computers, so Windows users will want to reformat it before using it — easy enough to do and just set up.

Utility software is certainly not a necessity, especially since more users will use the drive for storing or streaming video or audio than for backups. However, at this price point, it would be nice if CalDigit offered some extra value — may be some cloud storage or maybe a trial subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps.

As long as I’m picking nits, the other thing missing is some LED activity indicator. Due to the silent operation of the SSD, no one knows data is being written or read from the drive.

Performance testing

The Tuff Nano’s read and write speeds proved to be more than adequate (and much faster than hard drives, of course), but nothing special for its class. Of the four SSDs tested recently, the Nano proved to be the slowest behind the ADATA SE800, Crucial X8, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro. It’s not much slower than the others and significantly faster than the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO we tested a few months ago.

The details of the inner workings of the drives are an important thing to note. All of the drives tested to support the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface use PCI Express internally (drive, controller, and bridging silicon) allows for faster speeds than external SSDs that were previously based on SATA drives, controllers, and bridges. Second-origin (SATA) drives will typically see sequential read and write speeds peaking between 450MB and 550MB per second. When comparing drives with internal PCI Express and SATA, you’ll see this, especially in the Crystal DiskMark tests. Bottom line: CalDigit performs within its class, and it’s an upgrade over previous pre-PCI Express external SSDs in terms of speed.

where can you get a CalDigit Tuff Nano online

CalDigit Tuff Nano – Compact Rugged IP67 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 10Gb/s External NVME SSD, Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 Mac and PC, Up to 1055MB/s (512GB, Charcoal Black): Buy it now

Blackmagic 3.1 Disk Speed ​​Test

Blackmagic is a Mac-only utility used to measure drive performance. Created by an Australian video hardware and software manufacturer. This test is commonly used to help videographers determine how a drive is performing when loading, saving, or streaming large video files and is a great way to see how the drive handles very large files of any kind. In this test, the Tuff Nano had slower read and write speeds than most of the other SSDs tested, although not by much.

Plugged into a 2016 MacBook Pro, the Nano’s 916MBps read and 763MBps write ahead of the competition (although they blew away the HyperX drive) but were pretty close to CalDigit’s advertised transfer speeds in the 1,000MBps range.

Drag and drop test

I copy a 1.2GB test folder containing several different files to an external SSD, with a stopwatch telling us how long the transfer takes. That provides a good reality check of baud rates.

As with the Blackmagic test above, the Tuff Nano is slower than the other SSDs tested except for the SATA-based HyperX Savage EXO (and it’s not much faster than that unit). It took about twice as long to complete a transfer as fast as the ADATA SE800 and SanDisk Extreme Pro.

PCMark 8

PCMark 8 has a storage test that measures the drive’s performance in simulating everyday workloads like video conferencing and word processing. All five drives performed similarly in this test, with the Tuff Nano barely beating ADATA and HyperX.

Note that the Nano has outperformed the Crucial X8 and the SanDisk Extreme Pro, but not by enough to matter.

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark’s sequential read/write tests measure drive performance by reading and writing large, contiguous blocks of data. Again, the CalDigit SSD produced scores similar to those of Crucial, SanDisk, and ADATA and much better than the HyperX Savage EXO scores.

The Tuff Nano’s read speed in this test was 957Mbps, which is pretty close to the manufacturer’s claims of up to 1,055Mbps, while its 920MBps write speed tops CalDigit’s promise of up to 900Mbps.

Sturdy but expensive

The well-built Tuff Nano and its aluminum housing, sturdy internals, and IP67 rating give the SSD a sort of weight that ensures safety for those worried about our data. CalDigit also earns extra points for providing a plastic carrying case and dual USB cables. But its cost, combined with a shorter warranty than many other manufacturers (two years instead of three or more), makes this attractive motor less appealing than buying it. We recommend the ADATA SE800 1TB, which has a premium price per gigabyte but offers a partially higher IP68 rating, downloadable utility software, LED activity lights, and an additional year of warranty.