ioSafe SoloPRO: Disaster Proofing Your Storage Needs

There is very little to not like about the ioSafe SoloPRO. It has received universal praise from all quarters for solving one of the important issues in protecting data storage media. The technology behind the units looks quite solid, and the important fact is that ioSafe currently has a track record of recovering its customers' data 99.9904% of the time. I have seen various reviews pointing to the weight and noise of the unit as drawbacks, but I don't believe they are that much of an issue in the market which ioSafe is targeting with this product.

The necessity to protect one's data from fire and water damage can't be overstressed. For small amounts of data, an online backup service should suffice. However, this is not practical when large amounts of data are involved. Many small and medium businesses continue to remain paranoid about cloud storage. In such circumstances, solutions like those provided by ioSafe are the best bet.

For the consumers, ioSafe seems to be the only game in town for disaster proof storage. The good news is that the lack of competition hasn't kept ioSafe from innovating and trying to bring down the cost of their units.

For ioSafe, the issue is not about market competition, but more about consumer awareness. Most users don't realise the need for disaster proof storage until it is too late. That said, the rise in popularity of online backups means that ioSafe has to be able to provide more storage and multi-disk configurations in their enclosures to the end users quite soon. We do have some other suggestions also for ioSafe:

• There is not much protection against mechanical drive failures. Even in the case that forensic data recovery is able to retrieve the data, availability takes a hit. Some sort of multi-drive configuration with a RAID-1 or higher array needs to come to the market.
• In addition to local storage units, NAS configurations would be a good addition to the offerings. In fact, I do see that ioSafe used to offer local RAID configurations and NAS configurations in a tie-up with ReadyNAS. Strangely, I see no mention of this in the current ioSafe site. It would be interesting to see how ioSafe reinvents its offerings in this area. That said, SoloPRO units can always be hooked up to an appropriate NAS and the drive mapped on the network for use as a disaster proof backup.
• In my initial correspondence with ioSafe, I had made it a point to enquire about their reasons for not going with enterprise class drives. ioSafe pointed me to an article suggesting that there is not much difference between the consumer and enterprise drives in terms of reliability. I am convinced about ioSafe's approach, but it is quite possible that some consumers might want enterprise class drives inside their units.
• ioSafe has some interesting patents lined up, such as the one for disaster proofing a storage device which can be used in a standard PC chassis drive bay. It would be interesting to see if ioSafe can bring a standard drive bay sized disaster proof storage module for use in PCs.