In this day and age business continuity for your data is just as important to the small business as it is to the huge enterprise. I had a chance at CES209 to watch some execs from IOSafe dunk a hard drive in a pool (Chlorine and all) and then bake it to 1300 degrees F.
Here's the recipe:
- Rent a foreclosure house down the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center and bus the media there in Limos.
- Snap a bunch of pictures of the press while they scarf down the free food
- Copy those pictures onto the external USB hard drive sitting on the table
- Disconnect said hard drive from the laptop and get everyone to follow you outside
- Connect a cable to the drive and proceed to toss the drive into the deep end of the pool
- While it sits on the bottom talk about the company
- Haul it out and place into a fire chamber
- Place a raw SATA drive into a tray on top of the IOSafe and light it up
- Talk about the technology while the stench of burning plastic fills the air from the SATA drive on top
- Show everyone the digital thermometer rapidly rising
- Somewhere around 1300 degrees F carefully pull the melted SATA drive out and warn people NOT to breath the fumes
- Pull out the IOSafe and hose it down
- Peel apart the IOSafe and pull out the protected SATA drive inside the special water impregnated ceramic thermal shield
- Take it inside, slap it onto SATA drive dock and pull the the pictures from just a few minutes ago
Repeat six times a day and get massive amounts of coverage from the press.
Key to this product is the fact that the pricing isn't that much more expensive than traditional external USB drives. The difference is that this hard drive is sealed in a special bag to make it water proof, and a ceramic thermal shield so that it can withstand a house fire up to 1550 degrees F and the get hit by a high pressure firehose. The goal is to be able to NOT have to run back into a burning house to save your family photos and/or financial information. Wait till the fire department has put out the house and then sift through the ashes and find the drive.
If the drive won't mount after a fire, IOSafe will pay up to US$1000.00 to a drive recovery service to get your data back.
The last part of this recipe is to use your IOSafe with something like a HP Media Center Server or other flavor of Windows Home Server and set it up to automatically backup key directories on your server. That way everything is automatic and data you just can't afford to lose is safe. Heck, one of my classmates commented that he could avoid all the wear and tear of taking external drives home all the time and still have his backups safe from fire.
Want to watch a hard drive cook...click here
