Archives : 2011 : June
It’s What’s Inside that Counts
By Ian Duncan, Vice President of Marketing at ProStor Systems. One of the best sales tools that our team has in their armory is a clear RDX cartridge. It enables us to show customers what the inside of the cartridge looks like. Basically it’s a 2.5” mobile hard drive with additional shock mounting and ESD protections. Because the drive casing is also transparent we can show customers precisely how the technology works – seeing it up close is so much more effective than drawing it on a whiteboard or presenting a set of slides. It’s easy to think about the ‘R’ in RDX standing for Removable (as in Removable Drive Technology) but the reality for many customers is that the ‘R’ actually stands for Retention – it becomes the media that they use to store long term data on.
Most people are painfully aware of the retention requirements that Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and PCI have placed on companies – in addition to these formal requirements there is an absence of data management policies in many companies that results in an attitude of ‘We’ll keep everything forever’. Whilst that isn’t a particularly sustainable approach it does support the fact that companies of all sizes are thinking long and hard about how they most effectively retain information for an extended period of time.
The major technology components that enable both R’s (Removability and Retention) are broadly speaking the same. The standard mobile drive is embedded in a case with additional shock mounting and ESD protection but it’s the drive itself that has the technology that most of the customers are intrigued by when they look at the transparent version. Historically drives have used CSS (Contact Start/Stop) mechanisms which allow the recording head to ‘park’ on the platter when it’s not spinning. RDX drives use Ramp Loaded Heads which come off the platter completely when they aren’t reading or writing to the disk. This has a couple of major advantages;
In terms of Removability it allows a much more significant shock and vibration specification to be stated – because the head is locked down the drive can support a drop of up to 1m onto a tiled floor.
In terms of Retention it eliminates what is known as ‘Stiction’. If the head is resident on the platter (even if it is parked on a neutral zone) and the drive experiences any kind of vibration then lubricant is transferred from the platter to the head. If the drive is then spun down for any period of time that lubricant can actually cause the head to stick to the platter when the drive is restarted. This can cause damage to the platter.
These technologies are at the heart of what gives the RDX drives such a long archive life – a study by the Percept Technology Labs (available here – http://www.rdxstorage.com/PS-WP-Percept-Testing.pdf) found that within a reasonable operating environment (temperature up to 78 degrees F and 5 – 95% Humidity) the RDX drives are a statistically safe storage media for 30 years.
Post contributed by Ian Duncan, Vice President of Marketing at ProStor Systems, ProStor Systems provides solutions, which include RDX Technology, for the cost-effective, long-term storage of digital information.
Design firm relies on RDX Removable Hard Disk Storage System
Data Loss Opens Designer’s Eyes
Early in its life, a Brooklyn-based design firm that specializes in illustration and graphic design brand development, lost a year’s worth of work when a hard drive failed and they hadn’t made a backup copy. With RDX Removable Hard Disk Storage System, they are confident the firm won’t have to repeat that experience.
Fortunately, they learned this valuable lesson early in the firm’s career. Research shows that few small- and medium-sized businesses back up company data regularly, and most do not have a data protection strategy. Inattention to data protection has a cost: in fact a DTI/PriceWaterhouseCoopers report found that 70 percent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year.
One of the firm’s first clients asked for a specialized concept that would be at once ornate, detailed, gritty and coarse. The firms work on this job inspired a finely-detailed, Victorian style that became their signature, and they started researching, scanning and storing countless clip art images as a foundation for future projects.
As the firm grew, so did the need for digital filing capacity. The backup software built into the existing computer’s operating system could not keep pace, and their online backup service lacked the reliability and speed they required.
The firm knew they needed a better way to store and back up digital files – and quickly. The new backup system had to be easy, with rock-solid reliability and scalable enough to handle the growing business.
Through a colleague, the owner heard about the RDX® Removable Hard Disk Storage systems, which are designed to provide small- and medium-sized businesses with cost-effective, easy and reliable backup, data security and expandable storage. The PC and Mac-compatible system provides up to a full terabyte of capacity in each rugged, removable disk cartridge, and a docking station for easy, automated backup. The system can back up more than 125GB of data per hour and allows instant file access.
“My firm is small, but we have big-business data storage needs,” the owner said. “With the RDX system, we get a scalable storage solution to back up and store our files quickly and reliably and with instant access provided. We also get endless space because we can easily add more removable cartridges as our firm and data storage needs grow.”
Once the removable RDX disks for his Macintosh computer were formatted, they launched the software and followed its step-by-step instructions to create a backup schedule. “I’m not that technically adept but setting up the RDX storage system was easy for me,” the owner said. “I set it up to conduct a backup every evening. I don’t have to think about it – it’s awesome.”
The firm mirrors his hard drive on a 500GB RDX cartridge. They also use two 160GB disks to back up business-critical files, such as current design work, QuickBooks data and e-mail messages.
“A backup system has to be working 100 percent of the time. For businesses like mine, this system is critical.”
