ioSafe Solo USB Rugged Hard Drive
The basics
Imagine a very bad day - your house burns down. No one is hurt but the building is burnt to a carbon-crisp and to top it all off, the fire service has poured a few swimming pools worth of water over what remains in their attempt to prevent the whole street sparking up. All your possessions are toast, burnt toast. All except your most precious memories, your essential documents and the special tunes that provide the soundtrack to your life, all should be safe and sound on your ioSafe Solo 500G hard drive.
The good
The manufacturers claim that the data on the ioSafe will still be readable even after the hard drive has been heated to 815°C for 30 minutes. That’s hotter than most house fires. This fire protection is provided by an interior protective ceramic casing, which is chemically embedded with water, so that when temperatures reach 71°C the water is emitted to cool the hard drive.
Impact resistance isn’t listed on this hard drive’s crime sheet, but when we "accidentally” nudged it off a rather high balcony onto a concrete paving slab certainly dented the casing – well, smashed it really – yet once a loose connection had been discovered and plugged in, the hard drive spun up and spat out data as if nothing had happened.
The bad
The ioSafe Solo is designed to protect the data contained on the internal hard drive after a disaster. In the rare event that the ioSafe Solo is exposed to fire or water, the ioSafe Solo is designed to enable recovery of the internal drive and the data contained inside. The external connectors, after being submersed or exposed to extreme heat, should not be used. This episode of the Gadget Show did not follow the recommended steps of data recovery nor did they utilize the ioSafe Data Recovery Service.
All ioSafe hardware comes with a no-questions-asked Data Recovery Service included in the purchase. Should a drive be damaged for any reason - from fire to virus to coffee spill - ioSafe will spend up to £500 to recover the data and then send it back to the customer on a replacement device. Shipping and replacement costs are also paid for by ioSafe.
The bottom line
If you want a to protect your precious data, this is an almost failsafe data safe – just don't try to carry it too far...
User comments (9)
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eternal_spirit02 February 2010
I have had the 1.5tb ioSafe Solo for a few months now, this is a product to buy if you want to keep your data safe. i purchased mine from www.thetechbag.net. One thing i would say though is that the casing is not designed to last fire or flood, the drive inside however is, so that is how the data would be retrieved, by taking out the drive inside. Great product.
Report as inappropriateIT Pro03 February 2010
I agree with the previous comment, the fire and water tests conducted on the show were a little unfair:- expecting the whole unit to just work afterwards is just too much of an ask. The whole purpose of the unit is to protect the standard hard disc inside, this is seems to do very well. On the iosafe website it appears it's not supposed to be shock proof, so the tests conducted on the show of dropping it from a balcony were way beyond it's expected limitations; yet it still worked after. I want one!
Report as inappropriatejpeg08 February 2010
Was interested in this as a safer replacement for my Thecus 2100 NAS. However this unit doesn't support connections over LAN - only USB. Sadly IOSafe's Nas based offerings start at $7999.99 - a little outside my price bracket.
Report as inappropriateeternal_spirit09 February 2010
Hi jpeg - i have mine plugged into a NAS adapter. www.thetechbag.net offer the drive and adapters, works really well and is easy to setup.
Report as inappropriatephotog_rapher09 February 2010
This product is a real performer. I have the ioSafe Solo connected to my ReadyNAS (RAID 5) and set the Solo hard drive as a backup target for my most current projects. It works great and I get the best of both worlds as far as connectivity and data "insurance" My hope is that they offer eSATA in the future which would let me plug it directly to my server.
Report as inappropriateeternal_spirit12 February 2010
Just noticed on facebook, if you become a fan of "The Techbag" you get entered into a draw to win a 500gb ioSafe Solo, worth becoming a fan.
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gregor20 September 2010
Thanks for the nice post.I liked it.If anyone need hard drive or any computer parts check http://www.allpartssource.com/index.php/maxtor-genuine-5a320j0-320gb-5400rpm-ata-133-40pin-3-5inch-internal-hard-drive-new-bulk-pack-in-stock.html.It will be launch soon.Best wishes to you.
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