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.

I love New York (someone should create a marketing campaign around that). We were there last week
to exhibit at the PhotoPlus Expo, a gathering of photographers and vendors of all kinds. I had a chance
to walk around one afternoon and use my old iPhone (I must be in the minority of people who like smaller
devices, despite my aging eyes) to get a few images, including the iconic Chrysler building and the
headquarters of my favorite newspaper.

I just got off the phone with past Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic photographer Jay Dickman, who was on the road in Dallas, presenting another in his series of digital photography workshops. Jay is a long-time fan of CRU storage devices (back to the days of the devices being sold with the WiebeTech label) and is keen to talk about the importance of backup in a photographer's digital workflow.

He agreed that it's as much or more important than the creative process itself and a lot of care and effort needs to go into ensuring that images are protected and looked after. "I'm sure I've told you this before," he said, "but storing images in a digital format is not an archival solution." What Jay is getting at is that you really need to be conscious of what you want to store, keep it catalogued, and stay on top of your disk drives. Who knows how we'll be storing and accessing these images in the future. (Side note: I was cleaning out a closet in the basement this weekend and found a stash of VCR tapes. While I still happen to have a VCR player, it won't be around forever, and I sure will not be keeping one on hand to view taped episodes of kids shows from twenty years ago.)

Jay is one of several professional photographers we're glad to call one of "ours" as he trusts his work--which in turn, is quite often that of his clients such as National Geographic--to his ToughTech Duo in the field, as well as several CRU RTX devices in his home studio.

The image of the ToughTech Duo was shot for us by Jay, on location in Antarctica.

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.

Yesterday at Gustav's, a restaurant near CRU world headquarters in Vancouver, Washington, we kicked off a series of local events in which we’re talking with our partners (and partners-to-be) who specialize in delivering IT solutions to small/medium businesses and professional practices. As we find in many conversations, the talk inevitably turned from German food and our recent snowy winter weather to safety of data, whether that means encryption or physically removing hard drives full of data to an offsite location.