Thursday, February 21, 2008
WeibeTech’s Drive eRazor
by Brian K. Duck, Product Review Editor
What is Drive eRazer?
WiebeTech’s newest hardware solution completely erases all data from a hard drive quickly and easily. Stand-alone operation. No computer required! Faster than software.
Why use hardware?
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.
How fast is it?
Faster than software. A conservative estimate is 35MB/s. A 250GB drive would be fully erased in under two hours.*
Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed.
Ok, so I received a review unit from WeibeTech to try out.
First off the appearance and purpose of the unit is to safeguard data without using a dedicated computer to reformat disks. I’ve actually got a G4 setup in the basement for just this purpose. It’s appropriately named “LabRAT” and is used for little else!
Why? Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated 3 different removable drive systems, two of which use (P)ATA drives. One of these the BayDock 800 was offered by Weibe and reviewed earlier. (It appears to be offline, the review may have been posted prior to the adoption of Expression Engine as our content management system, I’ll see if I can republish it later.)
Parallel-ATA drives MUST be formatted before installing in the Macintosh, the older OS would simply not mount an unformatted drive. No explanation was offered to the user.
(The Serial-ATA (SATA) drives are less of an issue because you are asked after installing and rebooting if you’d like to format the drive. Some of this functionality coincides with the release of Leopard, the lastest version of Mac OS X.)
However, with the Drive eRazora new drive can be prepared without a dedicated computer, and dropped into a tray ready to mount and use!
