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Stripe: A Forgivingly Pliable and Portable Hard Drive

01.04.19 | By
Stripe: A Forgivingly Pliable and Portable Hard Drive

It’s imaginable Korean industrial designer Do Kyoung Lee’s technological design was born as a playful conceptualization of contrasts: a hard drive finished with a soft exterior case. Whether purposefully conceived or not with such wordplay in mind, the forgivingly pliant vented exterior of the Stripe portable hard drive serves a very practical purpose, able to withstand the shock of a drop without damaging the mechanism within.

The Stripe’s drop-resistant case proposes a travel-friendly design able to withstand the rigors of a device intended to be thrown into a backpack with regularity.

Forgoing rigid plastic or metal, the Stripe’s exterior is completely encased in pliant rubber, finished in a trio of fashionable terrazzo-like colors, resulting in a strikingly graphic form that more notably permits the 1-terabyte drive’s corners to bend and absorb shock when accidentally dropped.

The vented design also evokes the shape of a plate fin heat sink, though the nature of the material does not afford the design any of the conduction heat transfer benefits of a copper or aluminum case (a limited edition metallic external drive by Philippe Starck for LaCie executed this in striking fashion back in 2013).

A coordinating micro-USB 3.0 cable offers power and data connection.


The Stripe currently is a concept-only design, but shock-resilient external drives already do exist in the market, albeit with much more staid designs for those seeking storage with an extra layer of protection.

The shockproof design extends all the way to the bubblewrap packaging.

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.