The ioSafe line of hard drives are especially designed to withstand natural disasters and theft. Each is enclosed in a specially designed steel enclosure and ships with a 3 year disaster assistance warranty from the vendor (5 year protection is optional) in which ioSafe personnel will assist in the recovery of data from the drive as well as, if necessary, provide a replacement drive with the restored data; potentially paying up to $20,000 for the recovery of data from the drive (depending on drive model; see vendor for warranty details). The vendor does not, of course, guarantee the recoverability of the data itself.

Key design features of the drives include those for the prevention of damage or destruction in the event of fire, flood, theft, or building collapse.

For fires, the device's air flow mechanism can automatically shut, sealing the inside of the drive cabinet, when temperatures exceed 200 degrees farenheight (the vent closing mechanism does not require electricity to the drive to trip). From the inside, the drive is then protected from excess temperature via a combination of the outer steel case and the vendor's DataCast insulation, which forms a chemical bond with water molecules that are released as water vapor at temperatures above 160°F. The release of water vapor limits the internal temperature of the drive encasement.

For floods, the automated vent closure described above provides spray and splash protection for the drive (in the event of a high temperature, the vents will close, protecting the inner drive from the splashing of fire hoses); and additional flood protection can be purchased that allows the drive to withstand complete immersion in water. With this optional flood protection, the inner drive is itself encased in a water protected barrier shield.

For theft protection, the external units include a cable locking tab that can be used with a padlock and an optional floor bolt mounting kit. Finally, the external units' steel box construction and fire and crush resistant insulation protects it, according to the vendor, from a building collapse in a typical two story structure.

Originally offered only in a USB attached external drive flavor, the vendor now offers their disaster-proof drives in four configurations: the original USB external drive, a network attached drive array, and now 3.5 inch internal drives with SATA interfaces.

The USB drive (the ioSafe S2) attaches via USB (2.0), includes dual drives, and is currently served in in total (raw) capacities of 500 GB, 750 GB, and 1 TB. Data is protected via RAID 1.

The NAS drive (the ioSafe R4) is a ReadyNAS-powered enclosure that houses 4 SATA drives and features RAID protection at levels 0, 1, and 5. Connectivity is via Gig Ethernet.

The new entries in the ioSafe family are the ioSafe 3.5 Pilot and ioSafe 3.5 Squadron drives, both internal 3.5 inch enclosure SATA drives (1.5 Gb/sec Pilot and 3 Gb/sec Squadron). The physical drives themselves are 2.5 inch form factor drives; they are mounted in 3.5 inch enclosures with the extra space used by the vendor to apply the fire and flood protection technology as described above. The Pilot is a 5400 RPM drive with an 8 MB cache served in capacities of 80, 160, 250 and 320 GB; while the Squadron is a 7200 RPM drive in capacities of 80, 160, and 200 GB (8/16 MB cache).

The ioSafe drives are available now. Pricing starts at $329 for the ioSafe 3.5 Pilot.

Visit the vendor's Web site for further details.