When a guy goes around the country showing off the fire resistant capabilities of his company’s new hard drive by throwing it in a barbecue and firing it up to 1,400 degrees for several minutes, those of us who monitor stuff you gotta have sit up and take notice.

The guy is Robb Moore, and his company is ioSafe, based in Auburn, California. ioSafe used to be in the business of creating products that sold for many thousands of dollars. But lately, they’ve come up with a multi-gigabyte hard drive that sells in the $350-$400 range.

The ioSafe Squadron is a 200-gigabyte internal hard drive will preserve your data from multiple disasters: server failure, fire, water, theft and building collapse. Inside is standard hardware from either Seagate or Samsung. That’s surrounded by a waterproof barrier which allows you to lose your computer overboard and still access the data later. That’s protected by another layer of insulation material, which preserves the components in the event of fire. All of that is placed inside a 3.5-inch enclosure, which makes it standard computer equipment.

In the grilling demonstrations, according to Sacramento Bee columnist Bob Shallit, Moore would cook his drive, then connect it to a notebook computer to show that the data on it was still quite accessible. (It required a bit of cool down time in the demo Shallit saw, but then the device pulled through.)

As Shallit concludes: “Don’t try [this] at home.”

Posted on June 22nd, 2008 by dian