Introduction

Natural disasters happen several times a year, but the chances of one happening to you this year are pretty slim. What happens to that slim chance when you start multiplying years and years to the statistics? On May 30th 2004 I was at the Indy 500 hoping that the race would finish under the green flag before the fast approaching thunderstorm hit the speedway. The race finished as we had hoped but right after an announcement was put over the intercom, clear the stands, a Tornado just touched down 20 miles away and is headed right for the track. At that time the rain started falling like I have only saw a few times before. Of course everyone here in the Midwest has a tornado story, but this time it hit closer to home. On my way home that evening I approached a neighborhood just a half mile away from my pad; half the neighborhood was in the middle of the road. The tornado had torn this section of houses to pieces and it could of easily ripped through mine as well.

Tornados, earthquakes and hurricanes all pale in numbers to house fires. The US Fire Administration estimated there were 1.5 million fires in 2008. We have been recommending NAS servers for years and preached about the importance of using RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6 for data security, but never once had we really thought about what would happen with these products once you start adding water or fire to the mix.

Luckily ioSafe was thinking about these situations and started doing something about it. Today we will be taking a look at the ioSafe Solo, a low cost, single drive, USB 2 external drive bay that can take the temperatures of a house fire as well as the water used by the fire department used to extinguish the fire. Let's have a closer look at the specifications and features.