One Stop Solution For Media Duplication And Product Serialization

It is about this time last year that U-Reach unveiled its brand new Intelligent 9 flash duplicators in Silver and Gold editions, and this year an even more advanced model is coming along—the License Key (LK) Duplicator.

Available in USB and SD lines, this is a new breed of duplicator that will change the landscape for the industries in need of media duplication and serialization at the same time.  If you are in the business of distributing media containing intellectual property, say a USB drive loaded with a live concert video, you have probably tried inserting a license key to fend off unauthorized duplication; and most likely, such a procedure has to be performed after a mass duplication has been completed and all drives removed from a duplicator, followed by a tedious process to set up the drives one by one for a unique license tagging.  Labors aside, imagine the time required to go through the whole process!

And how does the LK duplicator do better?  First of all, it is equipped with the same engine that powers its Intelligent 9 siblings which deliver high speed copying at 1.5GB per minute across all target media; better yet, through a USB cable linked to a PC, this new duplicator lets its operator select files (or license keys) on the PC to be automatically appended to all targets once duplication is finished.  Through user-friendly software tool, different license keys can be saved under the same file name to make each target unique while preserving the same file structure/naming—such product serialization coupled with data duplication offers the greatest efficiency never achieved before.  Speaking of guarding copyrighted materials, another potential application benefiting from this solution is at a conference—attendees’ digital signatures can be saved on USB drives ready for distribution so that only the rightful owner of the drive is allowed access.

Interested in watching this new product in action?  Please stay tuned for upcoming videos, or visit U-Reach during CES 2013 (Jan 8th - 11th) at booth 31950, South Hall 3, Las Vegas Convention Center.

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Don’t Let the Bad Apple Spoil the Barrel

If you are in the business of duplicating flash media, USB drives for example, this scenario probably won’t seem too unfamiliar—while producing batch after batch of drives, copying slowed down all of a sudden, and the progress percentage number seemed to linger forever.  The operator would usually be struggling between rebooting and praying for the process to go through without the endless wait.  No matter which approach was adopted, quite often the culprit turned out to be one extremely slow USB drive that pulled back the whole pack.  But is there any way to identify which one?

The answer is YES with U-Reach’s Intelligent 9 Flash Duplicators.  In the scenario above, the slot number with the slowest copying so far will be displayed on the LCD screen, thus giving the operator a chance to remove the corresponding drive without giving up the progress made with others.  This elimination process can continue until the overall performance climbs back to normal.

It’s not only the time saved, but also the quality of your service maintained.  When it takes much longer than expected to copy a particular drive out of a batch, this drive most likely is inferior, if not defective.  Think about passing on such a product to your customer, shouldn’t you be doing just like the old saying goes…don’t let the bad apple spoil the barrel!

U-Reach to Broaden Intelligent 9 CF Duplicator Offerings

Building on the success delivered by the 40-port Compact Flash (CF) duplicator introduced at the beginning of 2012, U-Reach has since broaden its offerings along the Intelligent 9 CF line, starting at 3-target CF904S and extending to 120-port CF9120S.

Consumers learned about CF cards since the early days of PDAs, and even more became familiar with the media as digital cameras started to surface more than a decade ago. Nowadays, CF cards are ousted (except for a handful of SLRs) by smaller and less expensive Secure Digital (SD) cards in digital cameras; however, there are electronic gadgets across numerous industries that still use CF cards exclusively-medical devices, gaming machines in arcades or casinos, digital signage media players, electronic kiosks, ATMs at the bank, retail POS systems, etc., and the list will go on and on. It is for these industries, U-Reach continues to develop and improve its Intelligent 9 CF Duplicator Series. And the efforts include solutions for prospects using high-end digital SLR cameras to shoot and store in CF cards.

For instance, a question raised at a hectic newsroom might sound like this: "how can we accomplish the task of timely distributing the 32GB CF media just shot by the photographer from the field?' And here is an answer-"I used to have to copy the card using my PC, and it could take a whole day!" Commented an IT professional from a nation-wide broadcasting firm, "but with a standalone duplicator, I easily make copies in less than twenty minutes, while working on other tasks on my PC." Speak of streamlining, how about deploying hundreds of embedded systems running an OS (Linux or Windows Embedded) and proprietary software applications? Using CF cards as media source for installation is a viable practice, and CF duplicator is once again a much better solution than others. The capacity for such CF media is often insignificant as the embedded software usually comes in small footprint; however, a duplicator accommodating larger number of targets is preferred as more CF duplicates can be produced during each run. For mission-critical devices utilizing CF cards for data storage, the quality of CF cards is also crucial for the stability of the whole system, which is why U-Reach's Intelligent 9 CF Duplicators not only copy media, but also test for read/write speeds and bad sectors in the cards so you can start the cloning process only if your CF cards pass certain thresholds.

Besides sophisticate testing utilities and scalable lightning performance to copy at close to 4GB per second, U-Reach's Intelligent 9 CF Duplicator Series is also user-friendly, thanks to its ergonomic lightweight design and media guide rails to facilitate insertion and removal of cards. The replaceable socket interface effectively lowers maintenance difficulty and cost for changing consumable parts. Starting at $699 retail for the 3-target model, the Intelligent 9 CF Duplicators are here to stay, just like the media cards they duplicate.
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The First Ever Flash Duplicator Built for Yield Analysis

Production line report is crucial to yield analysis; studied thoroughly, it very often offers potential to improve production efficiency. With U-Reach’s Intelligent 9 Flash Duplicator Gold Advanced Series, not only can you record and manage duplication jobs, you also gain meticulous details on all the tasks — formatting, testing, copying, and validating — performed during a mass production run.

The Intelligent 9 Flash Duplicator Gold Advanced Series, Log Report contains the following three major areas—

To prevent unauthorized access and accidental deletion, password protection  can be enabled to safeguard the log. And if you don’t need the whole history logged,  there is a filter to let you retrieve the report for— Today Most recent days Specific period After the report is downloaded to your flash memory card/USB flash drive to be  accessed on your PC/notebook, it can be conveniently reviewed or printed. Besides being instrumental in improved production efficiency for managers, the  Log Report assists engineers and purchasers in gauging the quality of the flash  media, and it also makes a perfect presentation for sales to deliver to their  prospects or customers. Overall, Intelligent 9’s Log Report is essential to your  success. #####

How do you make an instant replacement for a defective socket?

The sockets are the consumables of a duplicator just like the tires of a vehicle.  After repeatedly inserting and removing flash media you will gradually wear out the socket in a duplicator and a replacement will eventually be required.

Since ease of maintenance isn't necessarily a design priority for most duplicators in the market, it can be very labor intensive and time consuming to replace a deteriorated socket - from opening the case, disconnecting cables, to removing boards, then reverse the whole process to complete the task.

U-Reach uniquely designed its duplicators to facilitate effortless maintenance.  In its Intelligent 9 Duplicator users can easily exchange the sockets in THREE steps which can take less than ONE minute.

With this innovation, anyone can replace a socket thus making maintenance costs associated with the Intelligent 9 Duplicator greatly reduced.

How to check the speed of your USB drive and flash memory card?

The "Reading" and "Writing" speeds of an SD card or  USB drive are two crucial criteria to determine quality and price of the media. So how do you check the speed of your USB drive and Flash card? Unlike the one-piece-at-a-time checking by the common testing software on the PC such as H2 or FDbench, U-Reach’s Intelligent 9 Flash duplicator performs on all the media simultaneously, through instant speed-checking and the H5 media-checking.

Instant response Press "Measure Speed" under "Utility" in the sub menu to get results immediately. Within 5-8 seconds of plugging in the USB or SD cards, you can get the reading and writing speeds.

Comprehensive inspection

Take three effortless steps of H5 media check to determine quality of your media, 
all at the same time—

1. Set up testing range
2. Set up minimum read/write speed
3. Show results

For testing media quality in high volume , H5 Media Check offers—

Greatest efficiency : checks all media at the same time.

Flexibility to set testing range from 1% to 100 %.

Automatically screens out the USBs or Flash cards that fail to clear reading and writing speed thresholds.

Going for Gold?

 

 Intelligent 9 

Gold or Silver ?

No, we’re not talking about the Olympic medals; instead, it’s about two flavors of U-Reach’s Intelligent 9 flash duplicators: Silver and Gold Series.  We’d like to take this opportunity to explain what differentiates the Gold and the Silver.  For details about Intelligent 9 duplicators for media such as CF, SD/microSD, and USB etc., please visit ureach-usa.com.

With a price tag of 25% higher than the Silver (or base) model, the Gold Series has certainly come with more bells and whistles.  Burn-in testing is one of the major enhancements.  For factories or businesses that are meticulous in the quality of their flash memory cards/drives, this utility helps them pick out the bad apples by continuously writing and verifying data for a desired number of cycles or specified duration (30 min to 30 days).  With models available from 10 to 120 ports, the Gold Series performs burn-in on all ports simultaneously.

Another addition is the logging capability.  For users who need detailed job reports for auditing or trouble-shooting purposes, the Gold Series can store up to 30,000 records and dump them all in a card/drive.  A typical record starts with a sequence number and timestamp, followed by port ID, status and task performed.  In the event a job fails as a result of a bad sector on the media, the location of this sector will also be logged.  Password protection of the log file can also be turned on if necessary.

An additional benefit of logging is to retrieve information that can be tough to gather otherwise.  Take SD930G for example, this Gold Series 30-slot SD/microSD duplicator logs the card IDs (CIDs) of all the SD cards inserted within seconds, which is very beneficial to those who need such information for serialization.

 

In the games of duplication, Gold doesn’t always beat Silver though it does fit the bill for those who need it the most.

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A Sensational Tool to Clone External USB Hard Drives

Introduced by U-Reach in CES 2012, the Intelligent 9 USB Series is a standalone USB flash duplicator that packed sophisticated features into a small footprint (about 40% the size of a tower with the same target count).  Its ability to clone external USB HDDs/SSDs is what we’d like to focus on here, for other features and more details about the Intelligent 9 USB duplicator, please visit ureach-usa.com. 

Unlike most USB flash drives, HDDs usually consist of multiple partitions and thus making it more challenging to analyze data stored.  To ensure accurate cloning of USB HDDs, an “external HDD mode” is available and has to be activated on the Intelligent 9 USB duplicator.  Furthermore, external USB HDDs consume more power than USB drives during operations (which is why you might see some external HDDs bundled with dual USB connectors to draw power); therefore, if a job requires copying USB HDDs, the Intelligent 9 USB duplicator can be hooked up with additional power adapters to cope with increased power consumption.  Different from other solutions which provide USB HDDs cloning as an afterthought, the Intelligent 9 USB duplicator is well designed to accommodate extra power connectors at the back of the unit.  Take the 30-port model UB930S for example, two power adapters will be adequate for cloning 29 units of external USB HDDs.

Besides cloning USB HDDs flawlessly, Intelligent 9 USB duplicator also supports a quick-copy mode which skips blank area to speed up copying—incredibly efficient when data occupies only a fraction of a drive with large capacity.  For file formats that cannot be recognized, there is a “whole-drive” cloning as the last resort, which is how HFS+ under Mac OS can be handled as the following enthusiastic customer testified—

“I have been running the UB930S day and night for the last two weeks. I have tried one-to-one, one-to-some and one-to-many cloning scenarios for a variety of USB flash drives and the WD My Passport Essential 500GB external hard drive. My application is providing customized class sets of identical drives (images and data) that are refreshed overnight and then reused. I am pleased to announce that the software in the UB930S is easy to use and highly effective for all of the situations that I have tried. I am also pleased that the hardware (including the customized power supply) worked flawlessly. Whenever there was an issue with the source drive, the panel lights and the digital display identified clearly that cloning would not be successful. And whenever there was a problem with one or more of the target drives, both the panel lights and the digital display indicated exactly which drives would not be reliable for cloning. This shows that the UB930S is a sensational tool for cloning both flash drives and hard drives.”

Toshiba Lanches Wi-Fi Camera SD Cards

 New Wi-Fi SD Card

This summer Toshiba will launches its new Wi-Fi enabled SD card for cameras.  These cards will let users share their photos immediately, at the time and place when their photos are taken. Up to 10 devices can share the miniature wireless network, that the SD card generates, to download photos from its memory.   The 8GB card is currently available in Japan and sells for about 6,000 Japanese Yen (US $72), while a regular SD card sells for a fraction of that price. 

In the future, Wi-Fi enabled SD cards may be obsolete because digital camera makers are building Wi-Fi features directly into the hardware of the camera.

TeraMarketing

Kingston Digital Announces Card Reader with USB 3.0

USB 3.0 Card Reader

In April, Kingston announced that it has updated its MobileLite G3 card reader with USB3.0 support.  The newest MobileLite is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and supports SD/SDHC/SDXC/microSD, and Memory Stick Pro Duo.  The device is compatible with most operating systems but will not work with Macs.  The MobileLite G3 costs $10 and comes with a two-year warranty and free tech support.

TeraMarketing

Garmin Partners with Suzuki

Garmin GPS Navigation in Your Suzuki Vehicle 

For the first time ever, Garmin’s navigation and entertainment system will be coming to the dashboard of Suzuki vehicles.  Most American 2013-model Suzuki vehicles will come with the Garmin navigation and entertainment voice-enabled system.  Garmin’s system will have a 6.1-inch high-resolution, touch screen display, CD player and radio.  The navigation system will also come equipped with a USB port to transfer travel routes, photos and music and a SD card slot to easily load map updates.

TeraMarketing

NAB Review

 Thank You for Stopping by Our Booth

 

Last month TeraMotions attended the NAB Trade Show in Las Vegas, NV April 14^th -19^th.    We enjoyed meeting everyone who stopped by our booth.  Reporter James E. O'Neal stopped by our booth to speak with TeraMotions and to snap a few pictures.  O'Neal even featured U-Reach, along with a picture of the U-Reach booth and U-Reach's representative, Faith Her, in his news article for the NAB Show Daily News.  Her is seen here holding U-Reach's copy-protected USBs and behind her are the Intelligent 9 Flash Duplicators that debuted in January of this year.  You can read O'Neal's full article here.

TeraMarketing 

 

Recycle This Earth Day Quick Links of the Day

Recycle Your Hard Drive This Earth Day

Earth Day is a great opportunity to remember to recycle.  You can reuse and recycle your old hard drives and here are some helpful links to get you on your way.

HOW TO RECYCLE HARD DRIVES

Hard drives are made mostly of aluminum which is easily recycled.  If you have time to dissemble your hard drive yourself wiki how has a tutorial http://www.wikihow.com/Recycle-Old-Computer-Hard-Drives

If you live in San Diego then the San Diego Recycling Center has free eWaste drop off every weekday http://www.recyclesandiego.org/

You can ship your hard drive to Back Thru The Future Technology Disposal; you pay for shipping and it will be recycled for free http://www.freeharddriverecycling.com/

AND IF YOU'RE CRAFTY

How to recycle your hard drive into a lamp http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Recycle-A-Hard-Drive-To-A-Cool-Lamp/

How to make a clock out of an old hard drive http://tgrounds.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-make-clock-out-of-hard-drive.html

This Earth Day Recycle Your CDs

 Earth Day is April 22nd

April 22^nd is Earth Day and CD Recycling Center of America wants to remind you to recycle your CDs.  CD Recycling Center encourages everyone to mail in their old CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays and the discs will be recycled for free.   There is no need for your old discs to end up in landfills when those discs could be recycled into new plastic items such as hard hats, recycling bins, office equipment, automotive industry parts  and much more.

To mail in your discs, just visit the website www.cdrecyclingcenter.com and sign in.  You can then print out a mailing label and mail in your discs.  Once the discs are received you will be registered on the website as an official Registered Member of The Compact Disc Recycling Center.

Backing up data onto a discs is popular today because of the 50-100 year life expectancy of a discs . U-Reach's CD / DVD / Blu-ray Duplicators are some of our most popular sellers.  If your data is safe for 100 years, just think how long it would take your disc to break down in a landfill.  Be sure to recycle your old, discarded discs.

TeraEarth

Quick Links of the Day

Links We Like

HP warns that malware-infected compact flash were shipped out  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/11/hp_ships_malware_cards_with_switches_oops/

The Compact Flash Association invites participation on CFast(TM)2.0 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-compactflash-association-invites-participation-on-cfasttm-20-2012-04-16

MemoTrek announces its new metal, key-shaped USB http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/04/16/prweb9400222.DTL

Staff at London hospital lose unencrypted USB with patient data http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041712-poor-training-blamed-for-hospital-258335.html?hpg1=bn
Should hospitals use copy protected USBs?  TeraMotions offers copy protected USBs so data can be viewed but not copied.

Quick Links of the Day

 Links We Like

 

• Scientists at UCLA use lightscribe to develop a new class of supercapacitor; using a graphene coated DVD and lightscribe technology scientist research new power source. http://www.gizmag.com/graphene-supercapacitor/21925/  U-Reach's controllers offer lightscribe burning capabilities.  You just choose a picture and the lightscribe burns the image onto the disc.  It is good to know that even scientists are putting lightscribe technology to good use. Here is a second article on the subject.

• War Horse and Chinatown are among the top blu-ray sales this week.  We Bought a Zoo to come out this week also.  http://www.nasdaq.com/article/war-horse-chinatown-among-top-blu-ray-releases-this-week-20120404-00835

• Nintendo 3DS is outselling Sony Vita in Japan.http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/3ds-sales/  Remember we blogged about the Sony Vita back in March

• Researchers at Drexel University claim that sensitive user data, such as credit card information, on old Xbox hard drives can be recovered  http://www.techspot.com/news/48029-xbox-360-hard-drive-retains-credit-card-information-after-factory-reset.html

• USB aquarium with music and light. http://www.zdnet.com/photos/geeky-things-to-stick-in-your-usb-port/6355635

Quick Links of the Day

Links We Like This Week

USB Flash Drives Shaped Like Hard Drives http://inventorspot.com/articles/usb_flash_drives_shaped_hard_drives_yes_really

Toshiba Announces Exceria SD Cards: World's Fastest SD Cards http://www.slashgear.com/toshiba-announces-exceria-sd-cards-worlds-fastest-14218340/

Nikon D4 Camera to Come Bundled with XQD Card. http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/cameras/nikon-d4-to-come-bundled-with-xqd-card-and-reader-1071612

We blogged about the XQD card in February

TeraMotions Will Attend NAB 2012

NAB 2012

TeraMotions will be attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Trade Show in Las Vegas, NV this year from April 14^th to the 19^th.   NAB is the largest international digital, audio, video, film and communications expo.   According to the NAB website, there will be over 90,000 media and entertainment professionals from over 150 countries attending.  The theme this year is "The Great Content Shift"  highlighting the demand for content, anytime, anywhere.  We look forward to seeing you there, booth # SL13415.

TeraPR

Over 400 Facebook Likes

We Like This

TeraMotions has reached over 400 Facebook Likes.  When TeraMotions started our company Facebook page in January we had just over 20 Likes.  We never imagined that our fan base would grow so rapidly.  We would like to thank everyone for their continued support and as always, TeraMotions promises to always bring our clients the best products along with the best customer service.  You can visit our Facebook page HERE.

TeraPR

World Backup Day March 31st

Don't be an April Fool on March 31st

March 31^st is World Backup Day.  The idea was developed by a group of users from the social news networking site, Reddit, and it is no accident that World Backup Day is the day before April Fool’s Day as the slogan informs people, “Don’t be an April Fool, backup your files. Check your restores.”  What if your hard disc drive (HDD) did crash on April 1^st, would you be prepared?

According to www.worldbackupday.com, a three-year-old HDD has a 6% chance of failing.  If the hard drive breaks, or is infected with a virus, it will be very expensive, if not impossible, to recover the data on the HDD.  However, if your data is backed up, you can simply purchase a new hard drive and restore your files.

World Backup Day is an initiative to bring awareness of how important it is to backup data to those who have never backed up their data and to those who do not backup frequently enough.  Data backup should be done frequently, not just once a year. 

If you plan to back up to another HDD, a one-target HDD duplicator, such as U-Reach IQ112 can be an affordable choice.  For more professional archiving to multiple drives, a tower or IT seried duplicator up to 15 targets should do the trick.

TeraMarketing

For more information on how to duplicate hard drives you can watch the video below.

How to Duplicate Your HDD with the IT1500