Curtis Chan called me Friday to nudge me to write something about ProStor, the guys who have made arrays out of removable laptop hard disks. They had sent me an external USB-connected unit and one hardened disk cartridge (about the size of a pack of cigarettes) just before Christmas and I promised to put it through its paces and report on it here. I have been using it for over two months now and hadn’t made good on my promise. So, I am going to do so now.
Here’s what the unit they sent looks like.
The only difference is that mine is an external drive and has rubber baby buggy bumpers all around, so I don’t break it when I drop it.
You can get a lot of info about the technology at the RDX Removeable Disk Storage Alliance website, including a couple of videos.
I am told that the motion picture industry, which met this week in Hollywood, is thrilled with this medium as a potential distribution modality for digitized motion pictures (what does that mean for all those digital media protections they were putting on Blu Ray and DVD?). It is, in effect, a really big floppy drive.
Pluses, as I see them:
- Nice form factor.
- Good ruggedization.
- Laptop drive designs tend to change less frequently than tape drives, so you have some insulation from generational changes in LTO.
- Capacities are good.
- Performance is what you get from any USB connected hard disk.
Minuses:
- Price of media.
- Price of media.
- Price of media.
The 500GB drive cartridge has a street price of more than $1/GB. That is expensive. I pay $100 for a 2TB SATA drive and maybe $35 for a decent USB enclosure. LTO tape costs me about .44/GB.
Still, I like the form factor and the capabilities. Their software for automatic backup is okay. I prefer other backup wares, all of which will target the ProStor drive.
In all, a small business could probably backup all of its mission critical data to just one or two drives. Taking them offsite can provide the protection a small business needs to recover following a disaster event. Think about it.
You must log in to post a comment.