The Emeraude, a French nuclear submarine, reached the Air France Flight 447 search site Wednesday to aid in the hunt for the missing plane’s cockpit recorders.

French military officials said the sub started surveying waters near the suspected crash site of  Wednesday morning.

France also sent two boats towing approximately 40 tons of recovery equipment, a surveillance ship, and the Nautile, a mini sub that will be sent to the ocean’s floor in case the black boxes are retrieved, CNN reports.

Plane debris was spotted about 600 miles of the coast of Brazil’s Fernando de Noronha islands, which are in turn a 200 miles north-east of Brazil’s coast. It is here the sub will begin its search.

French military spokesman Captain Christophe Prazuck said the Emeraude will be able to cover about 13 square miles of ocean every day. While traversing tough waters, the ship will actively be searching for the downed plane using advanced radar equipment.

To help locate the emergency beacons attached to the flight’s data recorders, two French vessels will be outfitted with two high-tech U.S. acoustic search devices. The devices can detect emergency beacons emitting from up to 20,000 feet underwater. The average depth of the immensely large search area (77,220 square miles) is about 9,900 feet.

The first ship was outfitted with one device Wednesday. The second ship set to carry the other device won’t arrive until next week, CBC reports.

“There are big uncertainties about the accident site, the ocean floor is rugged… so it’s going to be very difficult…it’s going to be very complicated and we’re going to need a lot of luck,” Prazuck told French radio, BBC reports.

The emergency beacons attached to the flight’s data recorders will only transmit a signal for about 20 more days.

If French searchers are able to locate the recorders, the Nautile, the same ship that explored the wreckage of the sunken Titanic, will be sent to down to recover them.

All wreckage will be taken back to France for investigation. All bodies found, of which there are currently 41, will be shipped back to Recife, Brazil for investigation and identification.

Click here for updates on bodies found and developments in the plane crash investigation.

I thought I broke it. But I didn’t. Phew.

The Buffalo MiniStation DataVault is a tiny little 160GB 5400 RPM hard drive that is completely powered by mini USB and features full disk encryption/password access for a nice touch of portable security.

It really is small. It’s not much larger than a first generation iPod.

Getting back to the first paragraph, Buffalo advertises that the HDD is suspended on shock absorbers in the case, protecting it from … stuff. Clearly, the best way to test this was to transfer a bunch of big files onto it and then start shaking it like a bottle of water with one of those Crystal Light On the Go packets poured in.

Then I dropped it on the ground. Not hard. Just so.

Then Explorer froze and crashed.

I pulled the plug, restarted Explorer and plugged the drive back in. Vista warned me that the drive was improperly turned off last time and offered to do a scan to check things out. It turned up clean and about half the files had transferred onto the disc. I transferred a bunch more to and from the drive and it seemed to work fine. I’ll let the reader be the judge there.

The best thing about the drive is that it’s truly plug-n-play. I plugged it into a USB port and it was asking me for the password in seconds. I also like that it draws all its power from USB and doesn’t require another one of my vital AC sockets.

As far as performance goes, HD Tune averaged about 28 MB/sec read and about 27 write, which is above average for a USB drive.

We test drives with HD Tune Pro 3.10.

The drive comes pre-loaded with Memeo backup software and Firefox and Thunderbird portable with a taskbar app to launch all the portable programs you want to load onto it. (Big fan)

It seems like a good drive and a great bargain at under $100.

Just in case, Buffalo does give a 3-year manufacturer warranty.