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| DataPort™ Removable Storage Modules |
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DataPort V - Review  |
| It is a pleasure to be able to add a great product to our "recommended" list from time to time. Such a product is the DataPort, a hard drive removable cartridge system made by Connector Resources Unlimited, of Vancouver WA. CRU was recently acquired by LabTech. In our recent article Building a PC 2002, we mentioned that we were going to replace our BayCoolers with the CRU system, but our order did not arrive in time. Just as well, for this is a product worth more than mention in passing. First of all, what is a DataPort? Taken from the well-designed user manual (yes), CRU says:
I ordered my DataPort V plus kits from MegaHaus. There are dozens of different configurations for IDE, ATA and SCSI. I needed ATA-66/ATA-100, and I decided all-metal construction was not that much more costly than plastic or metal and plastic kits. Other vendors list DataPort components, but MegaHaus was the only website offering an adequately organized and comprehensible parts table. Their entries cross-foot to the CRU web page, where more detailed descriptions are available. Below is the CRU site parts list for a "kit" consisting of a frame and cartridge. Fry's is selling the metal cartridge for $45, and the frame for $42 (total $87), which you order both components as a "kit". This is considerably lower than MSRP! After ordering and installing two kits and a third standalone cartridge, I liked this system so much that I pondered my new backup plan, and I ordered a third kit. I installed this today. The top photo shows my new Cooler Master case system with a "full house" of two CD's (player and writer), and three fully swappable DataPort drive bays. One or more standalone backup cartridges can be swapped out at any time and locked up for safekeeping. ATA-66 / ATA-100
In the drive bay photo above, the three DataPort modules are configured as follows, in drive bays 3,4 and 5, middle to bottom:
CD Bays 1 and 2 are Secondary master and slave IDE drives. The slot-loaded CDR in bay 1 is bootable. Channel #3, one of two RAID or auxiliary IDE channels, is driven by the onboard Promise RAID controller, which in turn can easily be enabled or disabled by booting into the BIOS. Thus, the backup drive installed in bay 5 can normally be safely offline, while the other backup can be locked up elsewhere. By the way, you might well ask, why do I need so freaking much storage? If this proves to be "too much", it will be the first time in 20 years that I actually overestimated long-term hard drive storage needs. When storage cost was over a buck a megabyte, as it still was less than ten years ago, I used to expand very conservatively, only to run out of storage in a few more months. I do not plan to swap out the top two DataPort bays regularly, unless there is a problem in which case a swap with the backup can be done in a minute or so. I use Norton Ghost 2002 to do drive copies from PC DOS with their utility. Done this way, the 100GB drive copies over to its clone in 12 minutes. The C drive, large as it is, only takes a few minutes for a full backup! I have not had a problem with drive copies. Even hidden system files are faithfully copied so every system volume remains bootable, and this is a first for me with Wintel PC systems. System software should in theory support a "hot swap". I have not even had much success with hot drive swaps in laptops with dedicated software to safely dismount the old bay #2 drive, so, I prefer a full shutdown and cold swap as being the safest, and potentially easiest, drive swap routine. I do not have a photo of the CRU cast aluminum frame/fan assembly. I got greedy and assembled everything before I decided a photo would have been a nice touch. The frame is heavy and solid; believe me it is rugged (kit warranty is five years). The frame mounts inside an empty 5.25" bay in a minute or two, using the usual four machine screws. It contains the rear-loaded cooling fan, the conventional 40 pin IDE connector and the standard power plug connector in the back, and in the normal layout found on the raw drives. The inside of the frame is slotted to receive the cartridge, which docks mechanically and electrically to the frame (and to the outside world) with one oversize 70-pin docking connector. The "dock" of cartridge to frame is smooth and well-fitted. Seating the connectors the final 1/4 inch is easy and foolproof, and you can "feel" when the seating is compete. A twist of the keylock completes the installation. There is nothing mickey-mouse or flakey about the seating or swapping of these drive cartridges; this is a critical-path operation for server rooms, and goes quickly, smoothly and reliably. The photo below shows the rear of the cartridge.
Drive installation and removal is a snap. The convenience alone of being able to work on a bench or table almost justifies the purchase price. Working inside even a roomy case is never fun. You snap on the internal power and IDE connectors to the drive, mount it with four machine screws, snap on the top and bottom cover plates, and the cartridge is ready to go. If for some reason you need to rejumper an installed drive, say from slave to master, this too is a lot easier to do while installed in the DataPort cartridge, than working within the computer case with tweezers and flashlight. The photo below shows the top view of the DataPort cartridge with the top cover plate removed.
The fit between drive and cartridge chassis is snug and compact, but there is enough free tolerance that you do not need to force anything to get it to fit. Below is a photo of the finished cartridge. Note that I label each one to avoid getting them mixed up. This is one well-made piece of equipment. Setup and installation is well within the capability of anyone who has ever added or changed a hard drive in side their computer case, and easier too. Conclusion If you are looking for a comparatively inexpensive backup scheme to replace your "removable storage" cartridges, I recommend that you look into the CRU system. Another advantage is that there is no software to fail or further chain us to the upgrade path. With this system, even a massive hard drive crash becomes a mere temporary nuisance. For once, the "professional solution" makes more sense and costs less money than those flashy, gimmicky backup devices and flakey software support aimed at the household and "prosumer" market.
Footnotes for regular readers: Whatever happened to my ADS/Pyro IEEE1394 backup scheme? Once ADS sent me the new bridge card, the unit worked fine, but, when I upgraded to XP, it did not work again. This may be because I never reinstalled the software, but, I discovered a more critical issue which has nothing to do with ADS. The FireWire card does not mount from DOS, but from within Windows, so, you cannot back up the boot volume easily while system files are locked. If the resulting backup is a file-by-file copy, it may be incomplete, and you cannot create a usable boot volume anyway if you cannot boot from the IEEE1394 device. If the resulting backup is a disk image or compressed archive, you cannot access it at all if your system is damaged and disallows a full normal boot into Windows. You can't access IEEE1394 from Safe Mode. While trying to load the system into my newly built PC (while I had PCI card conflicts and didn't know it), I had a completely "good" system backup on the ADS/Pyro unit, and it was completely unusable because I couldn't access it until I had a "good" system. For me, these kinds of if-then-else issues are show-stoppers. I understand Mac OS-X has related backup issues when the system is active, or the system is not active but you need it to be, in order to run the backup. If you weren't convinced before, this is all the more reason to go DataPort. References Connector
Resources Unlimited
Review by Alex Forbes ©April 27, 2002
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