Tuesday, August 7, 2012

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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Monday, August 6, 2012

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.