The most spectacular demo I’ve attended at CES this year–or, maybe, any year–didn’t involve 3D glasses or showgirls or a guest celeb such as Lady Gaga (who showed up at both the Monster Cable and Polaroid booths on Thursday). Actually, it was held in the chilly early evening at the parking lot of a sports bar off the strip, by ioSafe, a maker of rugged disk drives designed to protect essential data from fire, floods, and other disasters.

The product being demoed: The company’s new Solo SSD, its first drive incorporating a solid-state disk rather than a traditional rotating one. To show how disaster-proof it is, ioSafe subjected it to an extended physical assault that might have freaked out even David Blaine.

After the jump, the demo in photos. Warning: It isn’t pretty….

Here’s the Solo SSD–which is the biggest external drive you’ve ever seen, and which weighs twenty pounds–hooked up to a MacBook. IOSafe snapped some photos of attendees, transferred them to the MacBook, then put them onto the drive.

Then it stuck the drive in a makeshift BBQ-like pit attached to a propane tank.

And cooked the drive at temperatures of a thousand degrees and above for a few minutes.

Until it looked a little like a giant, badly overdone roasted marshmallow.

Did I mention ioSafe had rented a backhoe?

And a water tank truck?

They stuck the drive in the backhoe’s shovel.

And doused it (and my camera lens) thoroughly with a hose.

And raised the shovel.

And slowly dumped out the drive.

And used the steamshovel to drive over it.

This picture came out particularly blurry, but trust me–the drive didn’t look any better in real life. It seemed to be an ex-drive–pretty much a pile of mush.

But in the mush was the drive unit, which ioSafe houses in a thick steel case.

They removed the screws.

Revealing the disk module inside, which didn’t look great–but was still in one piece.

They then reconnected the bare drive to the MacBook. And the photos it contained–including this one of me–were present and accounted for.

The Solo SSD costs $499 for a 64GB version, $749 for 128GB and $1250 for 256GB. It’s shipping next month.

 
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