External Hard drive :: Olixir transportable external hard drives data storage solutions
Rugged External Hard Drives
Portable external hard drives with physical shock protection
A highly reliable external hard drive is the optimal solution for any kind of serious data backup and for transporting large quantities of data from one location to another. If you're fed up with losing an external hard drive and all the data on it due to a scarcely perceptible tap while it was activated or an un-noticed bump while you were carrying it to work, then you should seriously consider converting your data storage to the rugged Olixir media which are specifically designed to obviate the excessive sensitivity to knocks and bumps seen in other external hard drives.
Olixir hard drive features
• Available from 120 GB to 750 GB
•Protect your data storage from negative effects of vibration, knocks, bumps and drops using a novel 1,200G shock-protected housing.
• Extremely rapid data transfer via USB 2.0 cable and other Centronic interface options (Firewire cable, Serial ATA cable (SATA), PCMCIA cable, 5.25" docking bay)
• Multiple external drives can be assembled in Desktop Tower or Rackmount Chassis configurations, providing Terabyte data storage capacity with RAID and Hotswap drive exchange capability.
• Comes with a 3-year warranty
If you are located in UK, Switzerland, Germany or Italy, contact us for further details and custom solutions:
IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT: if you are located in UK, Switzerland, Germany or Italy, our prices will be better than ordering directly from the manufacturer in the USA.
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Olixir shock- and vibration-protected external hard drives provide rugged, transportable data storage and data backup solutions. Traditional external hard drive-based data storage and backup solutions suffer from a lack of adequate shock and vibration protection, which puts data at risk every time the drive is bumped while on a desk or being transported. It takes only a small amount of shock and vibration to damage standard external hard drives, which is why physical shock protection and vibration protection are essential wherever data must be transported or moved. The core foundation for these innovative solutions comes in the form of Olixir's Mobile DataVault Rugged External Hard Drive. These drives provide effective shock and vibration protection even when switched on and dramatic protection when switched off.
4-Bay Desktop Tower System
Using the Olixir external bay, you can combine blocks of external hard drives with optional RAID and Hotswap facilities. This system is an ideal robust replacement for tape backup which is expensive (both the medium and the maintenance) and susceptible to all kinds of negative environmental influences that make it highly unreliable. Hard drive backup, in contrast, is extremely reliable and allows for rapid recovery from disaster situations. The Olixir external bay solution with backup software adds a level of convenience lacking in other portable hard drive solutions and the anti-shock protection has no equivalent.
Acute and chronic damage to hard drives due to physical impact
All hard drive manufacturers list the sensitivity of their products to mechanical impact in the specifications of the drive. There is a major distinction between drive sensitivity to impact while the drive is running (operating) and when it is switched off (non-operating). In the latter case, the read-write heads are in a secured position, preventing impact-induced damage within quite narrow limits.
All of the newer hard drives can survive gentler bumps and jolts such as, for example, bumping the computer under the desk with your leg, without any problem.
However, vertical impacts of any kind can be disastrous because contact of the read-write heads with the disk surface will, almost invariably, quickly cause total failure of the drive. As a result, the following should be avoided:
• Dragging a computer across a carpeted surface in such a way that it "hobbles" • Lifting the computer, or only one side of it, and then setting it down with a rough jolt • Doing maintenance work on the computer while it is running
On the other hand, interferences are less problematic when the computer is switched off. In this case, damage can only be caused by rough handling, such as:
• Dropping a hard drive • Tipping over a hard drive that is standing on its side • Roughly bumping the drive against hard objects
Such impacts are harmful not only to the device's life expectancy, but also to the ball bearings that are used most of the time. You can recognise handling errors in internal and external hard drives from the operating noise - for example, the characteristic "toc toc" sound of the read-write heads impacting a physical buffer. This usually coincides with a dramatic decrease in data transfer rate and means that the drive will soon fail.
For the most part, isolated bumps will not harm a drive immediately, but recurring impacts will. This is precisely what Olixir have set out to prevent by insulating the installed drive as heavily as possible with a number of novel shock-dampening methodologies and materials. A drop of 3 cm onto a hard surface by an operating Iomega external hard drive, in our experience, destroys the device. This does not happen with an operating Olixir drive, and a non-operating Olixir drive can withstand a drop of more than 100 cm.
Peripherals IDE Docking Bay for Mobile DataVault Series 2 & 3 Rugged Hard Drives USB 2.0 Docking Bay for Mobile DataVault Series 2 & 3 Rugged Hard Drives SATA Docking Bay for Mobile DataVault Series 2 & 3 Rugged Hard Drives USB 2.0 Cable with Power Supply Firewire Cable with Power Supply SATA Cable with Power Supply USB 2.0 Cable only (without Power Supply) Firewire Cable only (without Power Supply) SATA Cable only (without Power Supply) Power Supply only