Need To Physically Destroy a Hard Drive? Try HDD Terminator!

CES 2013 is well over now, yet the impacts it has made on certain industries are just about to get noticed.  As one of the 3,000 exhibitors, U-Reach is proud to be a contributor to an event of this overwhelming scale, not to mention the new hard drive destroyer which has been selected as one of the interesting finds by CNET during the show.

Made in Germany, this HDD Terminator HDT1 has attracted incredible attention since its debut in CES.  The idea is so simple that people understand its purpose the minute they set eyes on it—destroy a hard drive by punching through it a few holes so the drive won't be able to spin anymore and thus data become unrecoverable.  If you are not familiar with businesses in certain segments that are meticulous about data security, it will be hard to believe how much efforts have been spent on making sure no data can be retrieved once a hard drive is no longer in service.  We have certainly heard lots of stories about how people disposed of their hard drives, and none beats this one from a lady in a CPA office, “we would carry a truckload of hard drives to the desert, and blew them off with our shotguns.”

With 8,000 pounds of force exerted during a destruction cycle, it takes HDT1 approximately 5 seconds to destroy any hard drive up to 1.1 inches in thickness.  There is no software or electrical circuit involved, all it takes is solid metal and mechanics—well designed to deliver lethal punches while reducing maintenance efforts to the minimal. 

HDT1 is scheduled to ship in US in a month or two with a retail price set around $1,600.

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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.