With the holidays rapidly approaching, we wanted to share some gift ideas for the IT tech or professional in your life. Is there a guy in your life who loves computers? Who has spare computer parts in his office, den, or workplace? Then we might have just the gift for you.

The CRU® Mouse Jiggler MJ-3 has many fun uses; and PC gamers, IT professionals, and presenters keep the Mouse Jiggler MJ-3 close at hand for many reasons.
What makes this compact device so cool?

CRU® DriveBoxes are a necessity for protecting an archive of bare hard drives. For the person on your list who has a library or small collection of hard drives, CRU DriveBoxes keep them, and the data they contain, safe from dust, dirt, and magnetic fields which damage them.

There’s a good reason why so many professional photographers rely on CRU® devices. And if your holiday gift list has a photographer, videographer, or anyone who cares about an easy way to create multiple copies of images, video files, or other important data, the CRU ToughTech® Duo is an essential gift they’ll thank you for.

A good friend of mine, Jeff, is a PC modder. He tricks out PCs, turning creative ideas for the cases into high-performance machines that, at first glance, you wouldn’t recognize as a computer. He periodically enters them into contests at LAN events in Portland, and I’m always amazed at what he creates. You can view the step-by-step process, and his project archive, at his blog. You can see his most recent build here.

Jeff also has a sophisticated home entertainment network, where he has a vast collection of TV shows and movies in HD. Yes, the amount of hard drive space required for that collection is enormous. We’re talking over 20TB.

Yesterday, when we launched our new CRU® DataPort® 41, this reminded me of Jeff and his huge movie collection. This might be a perfect product for him, and people like him, who have lots and lots of data on their system. They could use bare drives to back up their data and increase their storage, instead of continuing to just add more enclosed drives. The DataPort 41 gives you the convenience of four independent drives in a single bay, with the flexibility to use whatever drive you want in there. You can simply swap out the bare drives as needed.

The DataPort 41 holds four removable 2.5-inch hard drives – either SATA or SAS—in a single, standard 5.25-inch computer bay.

Open a drive bay by pushing a button to easily add, remove, or swap a drive or SSD. No need to open the computer case or remove the DataPort 41.

The DataPort 41 is a performance dream as it lets each drive operate at a fast 6Gbps.

There’s more detail on the product page if you’re interested in learning more.

If you haven’t already heard, Target, and its security auditor, Trustwave, have been sued over the data breach that occurred during last year’s Christmas shopping season.

As a leading manufacturer of digital forensic write blocking and imaging tools, we work with many digital forensics educational programs, and want to make sure that educational staff, institutions, labs, and students have access to the latest technology.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to know that my photos are being backed up when I’m on the road.” Mark says with conviction. “Before I started using the ToughTech® Duo, I was always paranoid that I would lose my stuff, because it was just on a single little drive.” Now he knows that wherever he is, his Duo is duplicating all of his images, on the fly.

By Whitney Kemper

When you’re a business owner or self-employed, your computer(s) are crucial to how you you earn a living. You’ve a lot to manage with your business, let alone worrying about backup and how you might recover from a disaster or computer failure.