New EzRAID FlexMount SATA RAID 1 Controller Designed For Disk Mirroring In Tight Spaces

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Hollywood, FL…Data Protection Solutions by Arco, a long established leader in innovative drive mirroring solutions introduces the EzRAID DD4 FlexMount, a SATA version of its popular small format RAID 1 controller.

Designed to offer flexibility of installation for computers with severe space constraints, this latest addition to the company’s line of IDE and SATA RAID 1 disk mirroring controllers measures only 2.2″ wide by 3.5″ long. The DD4 FlexMount requires no bus slot or drive bay and can be placed anywhere within the computer chassis.

“Our POS customers, in particular, have been steadily moving from IDE to SATA drives and have been demanding a RAID 1 controller that would provide the same small form factor and flexibility of installation as our existing IDE model. But, with PCI slots and external drive bays becoming increasingly scarce, the DD4 FlexMount could be a good choice for almost any computer. It’s ideal for any situation where the reliability of hardware RAID mirroring is required but space or resources aren’t available,” says Itzik Levy, company CEO.

No bigger than a pack of cigarettes, the DD4 FlexMount sports a high-impact, black plastic shell that protects the RAID 1 controller from other electrical components within the computer. The unit connects via provided SATA cables. Once installed, the DD4 FlexMount sends all writes to both drives simultaneously, maintaining an exact up to the minute duplicate, or mirror, of the primary drive. If one of the drives fails, an alert will sound but the remaining drive will take over automatically and keep the computer up and running.

A PCI slot bracket containing a serial port, status lights, and an alarm-reset button is provided. Bracket does not occupy a slot but simply uses the opening for external access. Use of the bracket is optional.

The DD4 FlexMount requires no drivers or IRQs and is compatible with all brands of SATA drives, drive formats and partitioning schemes. The provided mirroring software utility can be installed under Windows or Linux or can be run directly from the CD-ROM drive, allowing the DD4 FlexMount to be functional under a wide variety of operating systems, including all versions of Windows, DOS, LINUX, OS/2, Unix, Solaris, NetWare and others.

MSRP: US$289.
Additional info: http://www.arcoide.com/ezraid_dd4_flexmount.php
Photos: http://www.arcoide.com/images/flexmount_sata.jpg
http://www.arcoide.com/images/flexmount_pci_bracket.jpg

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Copy Your Laptop Drive in Six Easy Steps

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Laptops were originally designed for travel.  You had your laptop computer.  You had your desktop computer. You weren’t supposed to need a large drive in your laptop so laptop hard drives, like laptop computers, have traditionally been small.  Small in physical size and small in storage capacity.

Things have changed. Laptops are increasingly taking over the function of primary computer. Operating systems (particularly Windows Vista), applications, and data files (particularly photos and music) are demanding more and more storage space. So, if you have had your laptop for awhile, it’s likely you have begun to feel a bit cramped for space.. 

Replacing your laptop drive with a larger drive isn’t difficult but it can be quite time consuming (not to mention irritating) to rebuild a new drive from the ground up.  It’s much faster and easier to simply migrate your old drive–lock, stock and barrel–to your larger drive.  Here’s how you do it.

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is to dig out your laptop’s user manual and find out what type of drive you have in your computer so you’ll know what you need to buy to replace it.   Laptops use 2.5″ drives and are normally outfitted with one of two types of drives: IDE (also called Parallel ATA, or PATA) or SATA (Serial ATA). If you cannot locate your manual, try the manufacturer’s website.  Most manufacturers provide PDFs of product manuals in the support section of their websites.

Note that some manufacturers require a specific brand of drive.  If this is the case, be sure to speak with or email your drive source and describe your laptop (manufacturer, model, etc.) to make sure that what you plan to buy will operate properly in your computer. For example, a larger drive may create more heat.  Question whether the drive you have selected or the laptop model you are using is capable of dissipating that additional heat. Most companies which sell drives will know what will work and what won’t.  Asking the manufacturer for advice may not yield the best results as their replacement drives often tend to be considerably more expensive.

2.  Once you have determined which drive to buy, you will need to figure out how to connect the new drive  to your computer so you can communicate with it. If you have no way to insert a second hard drive into your laptop (which is usually the case), the most practical way to connect your new drive is via the USB port. As mentioned above, laptop drives come in two flavors, IDE and SATA. The difference between the two drive types is reflected in the connectors they use to attach to your computer.

Neither of these will connect directly to a USB port so you will need either: a USB to IDE or USB to SATA adapter. These are quite inexpensive and some even come bundled with both IDE and SATA connectors in one unit. A Google search should quickly bring up whatever models are current.  Alternatively, you could use a USB drive enclosure with either USB to IDE or USB to SATA conversion built in. Another possibility is to purchase your replacement drive as an external storage device in the size you need. Data Protection Solutions by Arco’s EzBackup-pd drive, for example, can be ordered in a variety of sizes and comes bundled with backup software that would allow you to put your old drive to use as a backup drive. Again, make sure you know whether the drive inside the enclosure is an IDE or SATA.

3. When your new drive is hooked up via the USB port, the next step is to install drive migration software to migrate the contents of your old boot drive to your new drive.  You cannot copy a boot drive by simply dragging and dropping files onto a new drive.  The boot drive has a boot partition that is necessary for the proper operation of the drive.  This has to be copied to the new drive as well and this won’t happen without migration software. EzMigration, for example,  is a very simple, relatively inexpensive, migration software. You install it on your existing drive, follow the easy instructions for copying your drive and very shortly you’ve got an exact clone copy of your boot drive on your larger drive. Once the drive contents has been copied, EzMigration will quickly and easily repartition your new drive to ensure you can access all that extra space on your larger drive.

4. Now you have an exact duplicate, or clone, of your old drive.  The drive will be bootable and will act just like your old drive.  The only difference is that this copy of your drive has lots more available space.  At this point, you will need to power down your computer and go back to your laptop user manual for instructions on removing your old drive.  Take particular note of the orientation of the drive (face up/face down) as it comes out of the computer.  Also, if your existing drive comes with mounting brackets that must be removed, take note of how the drive fits into the bracket or brackets.

5.  Next, you will need to disconnect your new drive from any adaptor device you may have used in order to migrate the drive.  If you purchased a storage enclosure, you will need to remove your new drive from the enclosure. You may wish to install your old drive in this enclosure so that you can use it as a storage or backup drive.

6.  Install your new drive into your computer and close up the case. Reboot your computer and enjoy all that extra drive space.

About the author: Donna Barron is communications director for Data Protection Solutions by Arco, www.arcoide.com , which specializes in hard drive backup and drive copy solutions. Information and a trial download of EzMigration are available at http://www.arcoide.com/instant_migration.php .

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What you Should Know About Your Data Backup Storage

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You really need to be aware of your entire computer system, and this includes the matter of your data backup storage. After all, if you do not know everything that you need to about your data backup storage, than you are going to run into some problems if anything bad ever happens to your computer.

For instance, what happens if you are working away at something and all of a sudden the power goes off, or your computer decides to restart itself for whatever reason? A lot of the time this will happen, especially if your computer has a virus, and for the majority of the time if this happens your work will not be saved. This is where data backup storage comes into play.
What is Data Backup Storage?

Basically data backup storage is the part on your computer system that is there to hold files so that they don’t get lost, even if there is an unexpected shutdown of the system; this way, once you are able to turn your computer back on, you can go into this storage area and you will be able to retrieve the files that you otherwise would have lost.

Even if you do not literally work on your computer and so thus you think that you do not need to worry about this, this is certainly not true and you are going to have to make sure that you realize this. After all, even if you do not have any documents that you would be working on, you do have system documents and folders, and if you get a virus on the computer for instance, you have a risk of these being deleted or lost.

However, if you have the proper backup devices and locations, then you should be fine and you should never really have to worry about losing anything important off of your computer, such as this. Just remember that – as with anything else on your computer – you are going to have to get this upgraded after a certain period of time, and so make sure that you are aware of the date when you should be upgrading.

This may be a little bit of effort and take a bit of time, but it will definitely be more than worth it in the end for you to be prepared and ready in case anything were to happen.

 

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Author:

Roland Parris Jefferson III is an online researcher based out of Los Angeles, California. Need more details and expert advice on Data Backup? Then please visit our Data Backup Storage Resource.

 

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Avoid Disaster When Your Hard Drive Fails

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There are lots of products out there that will back up your data files. Only a few can backup your operating system files and boot partition as well. Yet these are the things you’ll need to restore if your hard drive fails or becomes corrupted and won’t boot.

Basic backup software programs simply backup files or groups of files. To be able to restore your entire drive, you need a backup software that provides both image and file backup.

No one really expects a disk crash but drive failures do happen—and often at the most inconvenient times.  In addition to the possible loss of important data files, a disk crash can leave you with the daunting task of having to replace the dead drive and reinstall your operating system and all of your applications. While you’re doing this—assuming you know how to do this, your computer is accomplishing nothing and, in many cases, so are you.

While this “rebuilding” time can range from mildly irritating to extremely distressing for a home computer user, it can bring a computer-dependent small business, or even a large office, to a virtual standstill.  Whatever you use your computer for, having a quick and easy-to-restore backup can eliminate both the distress and the expense of the prolonged downtime normally associated with a hard drive failure.

When you’re restoring from a drive failure, the best kind of backup to have is an image backup.  Most backup software products are designed to provide a way to backup and restore individual files.  A backup software application like EzBackup from Data Protection Solutions by Arco, makes it possible to backup your entire drive.  A complete drive backup is called an image backup or image copy.  This is useful because you can make an exact image copy of your drive and then supplement this with regular (daily, weekly, etc.) file backups.  This is useful because, while some files on your hard drive change frequently, many files hardly ever change and need to be updated only rarely if ever at all.It even works in the background so you will never have down time.

An image copy is a drive to drive copy. In order to create an image copy you must have a second drive to backup or copy to. This can be a second internal drive but it is probably best to use an external drive, such as a USB or FireWire drive as your backup drive.  The nice thing about an external backup drive is its portability.  You can easily carry it home or lock it up each night.  You can remove it and take it with you in case of an imminent disaster, such as a hurricane or flood.  The one essential feature of your backup drive is that it must be as large as or larger than your source drive. Your source drive is usually your internal C:\ drive but it could be any drive you want to backup.

An important issue to consider when transferring an image copy to your backup drive is whether the data will be compressed or encrypted.  While compression and encryption are useful tools, they can introduce the possibility of data corruption and this danger is magnified when dealing with such a large data transfer.  There are, unfortunately, a great many reported cases of users who, like my friend Sharon, realized too late that their “backups” were nothing more than empty folders or that their backup data was corrupted beyond repair.  When choosing any backup software, but particularly an image backup software, be sure that there is a way to verify the contents of the backup to ensure that your backup files contain good, usable, restorable data.

Restoring from an image backup eliminates all the work and time normally associated with rebuilding a new drive.  When you restore the image backup to your new drive, not only all of your data files but all of your applications, your preferences, your latest hardware drivers and even your drive partitions are all transferred to your new drive.  If you are restoring a boot drive image, the new drive will be bootable as well.  The actual time involved in transferring the data to the new drive will depend on the size and speed of the drives.

The only other issue to consider when restoring an image backup is the drive partition size.  When you transfer an image of one drive to another, the drive receiving the image will create a partition to contain it.  This drive partition will be exactly the size of the old drive.  If, for example, you make an image copy of a 120 GB drive on a 200 GB drive, the 200 GB drive will contain a 120 GB active partition and 80 GB of unusable space.  If you wish to gain access to the unused 80 GB, you will need to expand the 120 GB partition.  This will require a partition expansion utility.  Some backup and drive copy software programs include a partition expansion utility. 

How do you know if you really need an image backup?  Consider how much you value your data, how much time (and money, if you have to pay someone else  to do it) it will take to rebuild a new drive if yours fails and how inconvenienced you will be until your computer is up and running again.  With external backup drives becoming increasingly affordable, even home computer users can now enjoy the security that drive to drive backup software can provide.

Download EzBackup software and try it free for 30 days.

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Transfer your data to a larger hard drive

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If you’re facing the challenge of moving to a new or larger drive, you’ll be glad to know you don’t have to go it alone. Hard drive migration software can turn this irritating and time consuming chore into a quick and easy job.If you want to create a bootable drive that contains working applications, you cannot simply copy your files and folders from your old drive to the new drive. You need to either individually install each application or migrate the data on the old drive to the new one using drive migration software, such as EzMigration. Migration software is designed to transfer, or migrate, your data from your old drive to your new one all together. Migration software doesn’t copy your files and folders one by one. It creates a drive image, or image copy, of your existing drive that contains everything on the drive. Then it transfers this exact image copy as a whole to the new or larger drive for you.

The image copy created by your migration software is essentially a clone of your original drive. It contains everything on your original drive, including any drive partitions. When you clone a drive in this way, you won’t have to re-install your applications or any information you may have added, such as application or system preferences or the arrangement of your desktop. They will be exactly as they were. Your migration software will even migrate the boot partition (and any other partitions) from your old drive so your new drive will be bootable. Your new clone drive will even include all of the software updates and the hardware driver updates that you have installed over time on your computer.EzMigration drive migration software eliminates the hassle normally associated with moving to a new or larger drive because it makes the drive migration process so simple. EzMigration runs under all versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista and makes copying a drive a simple drag and drop operation. So you can skip the many hours it normally takes to rebuild a drive and the days or weeks it can take until you get all your applications re-installed and running just the way you like them again. With EzMigration, all it takes is a few quick mouse clicks and you’re done.

In addition to copying your drive, EzMigration is also designed to simplify any needed partition expansion. When migration software transfers a drive image to a new drive, it creates a partition the size of the old drive on the new one. For example, if you migrate from a 40 GB drive to a 120 GB drive, you will end up with a 120 GB hard drive that contains a 40GB usable partition and 80 GB of unusable space. EzMigration makes it easy to expand that 40 GB partition into the unallocated 80 GB of unused space and gain access to all 120 GB of space on the new drive.

Visit Data Protection Solutions by Arco to download a trial of EzMigration today. See how easy it can be to migrate your drive

 Watch this Demo Video and see how easily you can transfer your data to a larger drive.

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