Revealed at CES 2011, ioSafe’s Rugged Portable hard drive is the answer to clumsiness, spilled coffee, and cats like mine who enjoy pushing things off the edge of tables for fun.

Hat tip to Computerworld.

One of the things I like about my new laptop is the eSATA port—even though I don’t have any eSATA external hard drives yet. (I’m sure there’s someone out there who could correct that little oversight.) SATA (Serial ATA) is a faster way to connect your hard drive to your motherboard; most newer computers use it instead of the older EIDE standard. An eSATA port has a speed of 3,000 megabits per second, whereas a USB 2 port only goes 480 Megabits per second, and your normal home network cable will only transfer data at 100 megabits per second. (I wouldn’t worry about that too much, though, because your normal home ISP won’t be sending it to you at more than about 20 megabits per second.)

A computer with a SATA drive inside it will be faster than a computer with an EIDE drive inside it. But what about external drives? My two most recent external drives actually show up in Windows 7 as “USB to SATA Bridge.” That means they’re SATA drives, but I connect them with a USB cable. Theoretically,  I could switch to an eSATA cable—except that the limitation on that speed is cable length, and I couldn’t have a cable that runs 10 feet from my computer stand across my bed to where I work. So I guess I’m stuck with USB anyway.

StarTech has made a device for people who have bare-naked SATA drives—the kind intended for internal use—and want to use them as external drives with their USB-equipped computers, or perhaps to copy information from them when the computer they come from has died of something other than disk failure. This is the $139 (MSRP—you can get it at Amazon for $84.24 with free shipping) USB to SATA Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator Dock.

This is not an industrial-strength device, but one made for home use. (Machines for duplicating hard drives on a large scale are much more expensive, not to mention larger.) It’s compact and very simple to set up. Inside the box you get the dock itself, the power brick, three sets of plugs (U.S., Europe, and U.K.), a USB connector, and a very small instruction booklet. The cord is a little bit short if you’re trying to reach the top of a desk from a floor-level power strip (the power brick ended up dangling in the air), but it was certainly easy to put together.

Windows 7 had no trouble installing the device drivers, in spite of the fact that the package only rated it up to Windows Vista.

The dock isn’t much use without at least one drive in it, of course. One of my geek friends had kindly loaned me an empty 1 TB SATA drive, which I unwrapped and stuck into the “destination” socket of the dock. (It actually doesn’t matter which socket you put the drive in as long as you have the dock connected to the PC and operating in JBOD mode, but I didn’t want to take chances.) You just slot the drive into the socket to connect it, and press the eject button to remove it.

I was briefly puzzled as to why the drive didn’t show up immediately, but then saw the reminder in the booklet that said “The hard drives may need to be partitioned/formatted using a disk management utility before you can access them.” Duh! I knew that. It’s just been a while since I’ve had to do it.

So I popped over to Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Storage | Disk Management and found that it works pretty much the same way as in Windows XP, though I don’t remember this first step:

Since the Hitachi destination disk was only 1 TB and I wouldn’t know what to do with a GPT anyway, I stuck with the default MBR, then moved on to formatting and found that Microsoft had actually instituted a wizard at this stage.

Once that was done, the drive duly showed up in My Computer. (And wonder of wonders, it was possible to assign it the drive letter B!)

I did a quick test of the connection by copying the contents of my downloads folder over to the Hitachi. It seemed to go pretty speedily.

The next order was to test the stand-alone drive duplication. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to do that, but then I remembered that I had four perfectly good SATA drives sitting inside my Buffalo Quattro, and they were designed to be removed in case they needed to be erased. (The Ur-Guru is going to kill me when he reads this, if Jay Pechek, who gave me the Quattro, doesn’t do so first.) And the drives in the Quattro are only 500 GB apiece, so they’re small enough to copy onto the Hitachi.

So I took a screwdriver and removed one of the drives from the Quattro and put it into the “source” socket on the StarTech dock, which I had disconnected from my computer. (Yes, of course I disconnected the Quattro and turned it off first. And yes, there was a little dust in there.) The dock beeped at me, prompting me to hold down the “mode” button until it beeped again and the light turned red to signify that it was now in drive duplication mode.

And off it went. It’s still going: after an hour it had reached the 50% mark. Well, StarTech bills it as a stand-alone hard drive duplicator, not an instantaneous hard drive duplicator. The duplication rate quoted in the product specifications is 72 MB/second, which is much slower than SATA transfer speeds and brings us to an expected duplication time of nearly two hours for a 500 GB drive.

I would honestly have expected the duplication to be faster than the USB interface, since there’s no slowdown from passing the information through a computers’ operating system and none from having to use a slower bus for transport, but I’m obviously missing something. Maybe it’s the something that makes those industrial-strength drive duplicators cost ten times as much as StarTech’s.

The StarTech USB to SATA Standalone Hard Drive Duplicator Dock seems like a handy way to be able to use hard drives in rotation, perhaps keeping one or more off site. Because your drives are going to be somewhat more exposed to dust and other damage just sticking up out of the dock like that, so it’s probably better for drives that you don’t plan to let sit in the dock for long periods, but rather intend to store in nice sealed anti-static bags. If you do any kind of tech support and have to make rescue calls with any kind of frequency, it could be a very handy device to have. If you’re a technophobe who shudders at the thought of formatting a disk, you might as well just buy a traditional external hard drive with an enclosure around it.

My mother has attracted quite a following on Picasa since acquiring her D90 in 2008. She takes pictures everywhere: the grocery store, the airport, the hospital, the back alleys, the freeways, the kitchen, the dog park… She’s also started to fill up the hard drive on her much-abused Sony Vaio laptop now that she shoots in RAW (which Nikon calls NEF) format.

Despite a growing facility with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, my mother doesn’t really know that much about computers. But boy, can she create data. (And I taught her how to rip CDs when she was here over Christmas, so it’s only going to get worse.) That puts her into the same category as many of today’s digital camera enthusiasts, who are happily accumulating terabytes of photos and videos of their children and grandchildren but fall into the “I’m supposed to back up my computer?” category on my poll.

On top of that, Mom has two active kittens and a Border Collie. (Describing a Border Collie as “active” would be an understatement.) The cats are known to do things like jump into her lap just as she’s lifting the coffee cup over the keyboard, with predictable results. The dog slobbers on the screen, though I don’t think he’s actually tried to chew it. So not only is there a lot of data, but it’s constantly under threat.

In other words, this woman seriously needs a backup. Something comprehensive, but simple. Something that works automatically. And something big enough for all those raw image files.

So I wrote to Marilyn Kroner and said “My mom needs a Rebit.” (I last wrote about Rebit’s “ridiculously simple” backup devices in May 2009.) And, as luck would have it, Rebit was just about to introduce its new SaveMe drive.

Since Rebit already gave me one free device and this wasn’t even for me, I handed over my credit card info and bought one, but opted to check it out before sending it on to Mom, to see what’s changed since last May.

First, the name. I love it. Why didn’t someone think of it before? “Save me.” That’s exactly what you want your backups to do.

Second, the actual drive is a bit smaller and slimmer than the model I have, but just as heavy. It’s very solid metal. You shouldn’t drop it anyway, but be especially sure not to drop it on your foot.

The CD in the package is not for installation, but for rescue in case of complete system failure. All you need to install the drive is the fold-out booklet with the license key. Plug the drive into a wall outlet, connect it to a USB port, turn it on, and wait for Windows to ask you what to do next. (If for some reason you don’t get an AutoPlay prompt, find the Rebit drive in Windows Explorer and click on “Start.exe”.)

The first thing you’ll see is the license agreement. Once you get that out of the way, the next step is to enter your license key:

This takes you to the welcome screen.

Even as you’re reading that, the software on the drive takes over and starts backing you up. The first time takes a while. The larger your hard drive, the longer it will take. I had to tell it not to back up my second internal drive (right click on the little frog icon in the system tray and click “More” to find this option) in order to save time, since I’m only backing up my own machine for purposes of this review. If you have a large hard drive, you may need to let it run overnight.

You don’t have to tell SaveMe what to copy, because it copies everything.

If you hover your pointer over the frog icon, Rebit updates you on its progress. “Rebit SaveMe is copying data. Backing up drive C:\. 519 files remaining.” Clicking on the box brings up the Help file.

The backup and restore process work the same way as with earlier Rebit models: as long as the drive is connected, it will back up files whenever they’re changed. To restore individual files, just click the frog on your desktop, navigate to the file’s location, and drag it back to your computer. (You can also find the backed-up versions of a file that you didn’t delete by right-clicking on the file in Windows Explorer and selecting “Rebit SaveMe” from the list of options.)

Drive Recovery

As for full hard disk recovery (for which they’ve provided a recovery CD), the Help file warns:

Note: If your computer is rendered unusable through loss or damage, you may be able to recover to an identical replacement computer using the procedure below. The replacement computer must be identical to the original in every respect, except the main disk drive which must be of equal or greater capacity than the original disk drive. Any other differences can cause recovery to fail because of inconsistencies between the hardware and restored software. In addition, certain security features, such as fingerprint readers, may prevent successful recovery. If you cannot replace the old computer with an identical one, or if security features interfere with recovery, [Rebit] recommends that you instead restore only your data files to the new computer without attempting to recover the entire system.

This is not a Rebit issue, but a Windows issue, or rather a PC hardware issue: there are too many variants to be sure that everything will work if your hardware isn’t identical. Macs all have identical hardware, or very nearly, so they don’t have to worry about that. If your hard drive melts down or your operating system screws up, having a complete drive image including your software will save you a lot
of time and trouble. But if you lose your two-year-old machine to a fire or flood and replace it with a new model, your chances of being able to restore the complete drive image aren’t good.

Extra Storage

Anyway, back to the SaveMe and what’s new with it. The difference between SaveMe and Rebit’s previous drive—at least, the one that made it seem appropriate for Mom’s photo storage needs—is that in addition to backing up the current contents of your drive (and saving copies of things you’ve deleted), SaveMe can act as a storage device, the way ordinary hard drives do.

To test this, I navigated to the Rebit in Windows Explorer (it’s Drive G just at the moment) and created a folder called “Media Storage.” Then I dragged a couple of test items over: a video, a photo. It was just like copying them onto any other disk, and I could play the video and audio files from the SaveMe drive.

Of course, as the help files warn you, the SaveMe software isn’t making backups of files you store in it’s “regular disk” area, only of the files that are on your hard drive. And as I’ve warned readers more than once, if you only have one copy, it’s not backed up, whether or not that copy is on your hard drive. So if you take advantage of the large capacity of the bigger SaveMe drives for storing photos or videos, remember to keep backups of them somewhere else, unless you really don’t care if you lose them.

And now it’s time to uninstall the SaveMe drive from my computer, remove all my data by resetting the drive (it prompts you to do this when you uninstall), repack it, and send it off to Mom.

A couple of weeks ago (back when I should have been writing this post), the Ur-Guru and I had a conversation about archival storage. He wondered what was going to replace DVDs, particularly for photos, because he was running out of room for them. He has hundreds now, since he has never thrown any away; some contain data copied from floppy disks or magnetic tape, back in the olden days.

Optical media (that’s the generic term that refers to both CDs and DVDs, because you use light to encode data onto them and to read what’s been written there) have been the consumer archive of choice ever since they became affordable. Once a year I copy that year’s client data and financial data onto CDs or DVDs and store them with my paper files. They’re flat, don’t require power, and seem to have a decent shelf-life, at least if you use the brand-name discs and keep them sealed in jewel cases where they’re protected from dust and scratches.

That’s all well and good for a year’s worth of my Word docs, WordPress databases, and mind maps, but it’s actually personal data that are outstripping optical media. Last time the Ur-Guru came to visit, he took home 80 GB of photos with him. That’s a lot of DVDs. It takes time to burn those, and space to store them.

I suggested Blu-ray, but while the discs have a capacity of up to 50 GB (dual-layer), write speed is a max of 8x, and 2x or 4x is more common. The Blu-ray burner will only set you back about $200, but the discs themselves are expensive: they can set you back $10 apiece. Still, as the technology becomes more widespread—if it has time to—Blu-ray will probably replace today’s standard DVDs and at least temporarily shrink the size of our disc libraries. (Assuming we take the time to transfer our data from our old discs to the new ones, that is.)

Yet it seemed to me that with the sheer volume of photos that the Ur-Guru takes—especially since he works in RAW (or, if you’re a Nikon user, NEF)—the only feasible way to store his photos was on external hard drives.

But hard drives fail, as anyone who reads this blog knows.

They are, of course, much less likely to fail if they are not plugged in and spinning. The reason a magnetic drive is such a fragile creature is that it has moving parts, and they move very fast, and they move constantly. But a hard drive sitting on a shelf isn’t at the same kind of risk.

Even so, it seemed prudent to use two hard drives. If a DVD is accidentally destroyed, you aren’t losing very much data. But if you have a  500 GB or 1 TB hard drive and it gets destroyed—ouch!

So we went through a calculation of the costs. In the initial back-of-the-napkin calculations, the Ur-Guru estimated that it would be less expensive to use DVDs to store 1000 GB of photos. Then he realized that he had based all his calculations on the assumption that he would use 2.5” portable drives, which cost more than 3.5” drives. (Those are portable enough if you’re talking about putting them in your car, just awkward if you’re thinking of carrying them on an airplane. These are the figures he worked out the second time around:

• 1000GB / 4.5GB (size of DVD) = 222.2 DVDs of storage.
• 222.2 DVDs at 25 per spindle = 8.88 spindles
• A quality brand spindle of 25 is around 24 Euros.
• Cost of 2 XHDs (e.g. Samsung Story Station) @ 1TB = 170 Euros.
• Cost of 8.88 spindles of 25 DVD’s = 213 Euros.
• Savings: 43 Euros.

Additional Advantages

• Faster speed of backing up to XHD than to DVD (with verify on).
• Ability to replace files on XHD that you don’t have with DVD.
• Spread of risk because there are 2 identical XHD backups.
• 2 XHDs are lighter in weight and take up less space than 222 DVDs.

Two hundred DVDs stacked on a spindle don’t look like that much. In jewel cases (which you would have to buy separately) or even sleeves (ditto), they get bulkier fast. RAW photos at 10 or 12 or more megapixels, HD video at 1080p—DVDs just can’t cut it anymore. Blu-ray may come to take its place, but meanwhile, hard drives are cheap. Some of them are actually designed to stack on top of each other. And you can re-use them.

A few days ago I got a phone call from my BFF Jay Pechek at Buffalo Technology, apologizing profusely for not responding  immediately to my initial queries about Raid Troubles in Europe and his DriveStation. It turns out Jay was on vacation in Colombia and completely without Internet access for a few weeks. But no sooner had he landed in New York than he was off on a product launch tour and headed, in fact, for San Francisco.

So on August 27th I found myself back in the Market Bar with Jay and his boss Oliver Kaven, drinking artisanal diet cola, admiring the new toys, and dropping broad hints about my availability to do freelance writing.

Prior to yesterday, I had three Buffalo drives, two of which I acquired during my last meeting with Jay, in May of 2008. They are all solid, well-made drives that don’t give me any trouble. (Well, I seem to remember that Lachesis, the baby NAS drive, wanted to speak Japanese to me after a power outage once.) Lachesis could properly be described as “cute,” in the same way that my netbook is cute: she’s a miniature but fully-functioning version of something larger. But this is still a long way from “sleek” or “sexy.”

MiniStation DataVault	MiniStation Metro

The words “solid” and “workmanlike” are far more apt to come to mind. The Quattro frankly looks like a safe, and as for Vesta, the little DataVault, she looks downright virginal. Heck, she looks armored and virginal. Maybe I should have called her “Minerva,” but I already had an M drive.

But this year, in addition to upgrading its technical specs, Buffalo has recognized that electronics consumers care about aesthetics. As Engadget recognized in January, 2009 has been the Japanese storage maker’s year to get colorful. First there was the Cobalt (which Jay somehow never mentioned to me), and now there’s the Metro. Both are 2.5-inch drives. Both come with hardware disk encryption, Turbo USB, and Memeo backup or sync software. But the Cobalt is noticeably skinnier than the Metro or the DataVault, because it lacks the extra layers of cushioning that protect those drives from the hazards of portability.

Buffalo expected the Cobalt to be more popular than it was. After all, competitors Seagate and Western Digital have slim, colorful 2.5-inch drives. But Buffalo’s customers wanted security. They wanted to know that if someone knocked their drive off the edge of a table, it would still work. So the Metro was born, and it manages quite well to be tough and sexy at the same time.

First, it’s voluptuously red. A deep, rich, glossy, metallic, fingerprint-attracting shade. (All right, so it does clash with my hair. So what? I’m not wearing it as an accessory.) Second, the Flex Connect USB cable fits so neatly around the outside edge that it could almost be decorative flashing. In fact, it’s a good thing that the quick start guide provides instructions on removing the Flex Connect cable from its pocket. It’s also a good thing that Buffalo provides a matching extension cable, because that is one short USB connector. (You can remove the Flex Connect cable entirely and replace it with an ordinary USB mini cable, but that does expose the interior of the drive to dust.

The drive’s serial number is tucked neatly under the cable. The back of the drive is outlined in red anti-skid treads.

Naturally, I was eager to get this sweet piece of equipment home and check it out, especially since I need a replacement for Freya, my FreeAgent Go drive. Freya is the only hard drive in my collection that I actually paid money for, and she’s getting wonky on me. Fortunately, she has a 5-year warranty, so I just need to dig up my receipt and get the data off her. (The Metro only has a 1-year warranty, but does promise 24/7 tech support.)

Most of the data on Freya is backed up to Lachesis anyway, but I think that Ruby, the new Metro (unoriginal, I know), will probably replace her as my main backup drive anyway. Not only does Ruby have greater capacity (250 GB vs 160, though actually the encryption and other software take up about 20 GB), but she only needs one cable. Seagate’s portable hard drives have an unfortunate requirement for two USB ports, one to provide power and one for transferring data, and ever since one of my USB hubs died a couple of months ago, USB ports are at a premium. (And the problem with Freya is precisely that of getting enough power, whether she’s connected to a hub or directly to my laptop.)

So I plugged Ruby into my USB hub and got the Drive Navigator prompt, which offered to set up my password, install Turbo USB, and install Picasa. (I didn’t bother with that last.)

And here I ran into a little glitch. Not just the frequently-encountered glitch wherein Buffa
lo has failed to hire a proofreader to go over the user interface (ahem, HINT), but a more serious problem with the password setup.

If you make a mistake, you get an appropriate error message. For instance, the first password I entered contained non-alphanumeric characters, and I got an error message to that effect (except longer, and in poorer English, HINT). Then I chose a long password, and mistyped it the second time I entered it.

The third time, I typed everything correctly, clicked “OK”—and got a message that said “Failed.” So I did it all over again. Same message: “Failed.” So I clicked “Cancel” and went on to the next step, installing Turbo USB. That required disconnecting and re-connecting the drive. When I re-connected the drive, I was prompted to enter my password.

The password worked, but I was decidedly puzzled. I took a look in the manual (included in PDF form on the disk) and checked out the program called, I kid you not, “SecureLockManagerEasy.” (I ask you. How about “Easy Secure Lock Manager”? Or even “Secure Lock Easy Manager”? It’s bad enough calling a pocket-sized drive a “Station” when it’s not meant to be stationary and doesn’t broadcast, but “SecureLockManagerEasy” has a sort of Third World warez sound to it.) This is what you use to change your password, and also to tell the Metro to log on automatically if it recognizes your computer. And it’s where you reset the drive to factory settings if you can’t remember your password, but you’d better remember it, because that reset wipes all the data off the drive.

I went through the password reset process just to see whether it would actually work if I did it there, but no. Or rather, it did work, but instead of a confirmation, I just got that “Failed” message. I turned on the automatic authentication, so now when I connect the drive, I get a notice saying the drive has authenticated. There’s a little white light under the red panel on top the Metro to indicate that encryption is on, just under the lock-and-key symbol (which is almost too small to identify). There’s also a little blue light across from it to indicate activity on the drive. It looks slightly purple through the red, just as the white looks slightly pink.

I also ran into some hangups when trying to copy files directly from Freya to Ruby. I’m not sure why this happened, but I ended up having to reboot my machine. I ended up reformatting Ruby as NTFS and plugging her directly into the laptop, and I’ve been copying files from Lachesis. So far there have been no more problems, so the root issue may have been with Freya, or it may have been with the FAT32 format the drive came in. (What is it with FAT32? Does anyone with Windows actually use it? Don’t Mac users have to reformat the disk anyway?)

Since the folks over at Memeo are pestering me to review their latest full version software when it’s ready (it’s in beta right now), I didn’t install that. Once I’ve finished the file transfer, I’ll revise my settings in Karen’s Replicator so that my on-startup backups go over to Ruby. I’ll probably move her back over to the USB hub, as well.

Now, to dig up that receipt for Freya…