New solid state drive data protection available

The ioSafe series of storage devices offer a number of fireproof and waterproof storage devices. At CES 2010, the new ioSafe Solo SSD series of devices were released. This series of the heavily protected storage system offers data protection for medium-size businesses and shock protection for small businesses and home users.

In a previous post, I wrote about how the ioSafe devices provide serious protection against fire and water. With the SSD model, the addition of shock protection addresses the major shortcoming of this series of durable storage. Figure A shows the ioSafe Solo SSD. Figure A

The ioSafe enclosure is made of quarter-inch thick steel and seriously rugged. The enclosure protects the drive against shock up to a 20 foot drop and can sustain 1000g of shock for 1 ms with no data loss. It can also be crushed with a load of up to 5,000 pounds. The fire protection for the device is up to 1550°F for a half hour. The water protection protects the enclosure for 30 days in up to 30 feet of water.

The ioSafe Solo SSD is the first solid state storage product for this series and connects via USB or eSATA interfaces. Other products by ioSafe include NAS servers that connect over Ethernet. The network attached products do not currently have an SSD offering that will provide shock protection, but this may change as product lines mature. Also, the current SSD offerings do not offer a RAID solution for the disk protection.

From a practicality standpoint, this is an additional tier of data protection. Of course, off-site protection is ideal for all types of data. Adding off-site backups with an online storage may be an attractive option for off-site protection. Possible obstacles may be bandwidth and service plan costs; in those situations, disaster proofing the storage devices may be a logical step.

Check out this related CNET photo gallery: IoSafe extreme 'demo-lition.'

Do you have a need to seriously protect data from physical harm? Does a product like this appeal to your data protection strategy? If so, share your comments in the discussion.

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