ioSafe Solo Pro external hard drive 2000 GB Black

After I recently lost the last 5 to 7 years of my life's data (financials, tax info, travel pics, etc.) to an unfortunate laptop HD crash, I decided it might be time to think about having a back up of everything in a remote location that I knew was solid, safe and most of all, protected. After looking around the internet and reading a few reviews I came across the ioSafe brand and started doing some cross reference checking. I never like to take one sites' word on anything, who knows who is paying the bills, so I always try to read from multiple sources before I buy. The ioSafe brand has a few online reviews, and the biggest knock against them seems to be price. I am not sure about you but for me to know that I have a quality unit in the first place is worth it in the long run. Quality hurts the pocket book once, where quantity hurts again and again. Having sedated my OCD like need to research I pulled the trigger and ordered up the 2TB USB 3.0 HD with the intent of backing up everything in our house (4 laptops - 2 personal and 2 work) and build a one source video library. The ioSafe 2TB showed up on the doorstep in a big box proclaiming exactly what it was on the outside. :-( I would prefer to see it shipped in a plain jane box, but luckily I don't live in a bad area and no one was the wiser as to my new purchase. I grabbed it greedily off the porch and was surprised at two things. 1) it was smaller than I expected and seemed rather dense. 15 something pounds is 15 something pounds, until you can hold it all in one hand, then it seems heavier for some reason. 2) The exterior corner of the box was crushed and I just knew this was going to be a problem. Went inside and opened the box to find that the drive was perfectly suspended in a high density foam chamber away from all sides and corners of the box, so while the packaging was crushed, the unit was untouched and in perfect condition. Yay! The instructions are super easy to follow and since my laptop is running Win 7, I literally just had to plug the unit in, plug in the USB 3.0 cable, click okay/accept a couple of times and it self installed on my laptop in about 2-3 minutes. Bonus!! No extra hassles, no software downloads, no running three discs to pre-load software that you have to manipulate, it did it all itself. (Skynet? What??) Having successfully installed the drive I was now ready to do some transfering of files to free up some space and create a back up of my new laptop drive. The USB 3.0 is very fast transferring files and the HD runs with a very soft whirl of the cool fan. Unless the room is totally crypt silent, you can't even tell that it's running. No noisy spinning drives, no constant hum or whir of a unit you are unsure of whether it is about to give up the ghost soon or not, this unit is just a solid piece of hardware that will treat you right. I have been running the unit for about 10 days now, moving files up and down to and from it the unit as our video library is taking shape and there have been no problems with my loading a movie onto the HD and my wife plugging in her completely different laptop and uploading it for viewing. No proprietary issues, no problems even though two laptops run other than Win 7 software (my work laptop runs XP and I don't know about her work laptop). Everything has performed as advertised (though I haven't tested the underwater or in a fire options and hope to never have too). LOL After a few days of owning the unit I got an e-mail from the president of the company. While it would be easy in this day and age to have a boiler plate, blah, blah, blah e-mail automatically generated saying "Thanks for buying" hit your inbox, this one actually had some research done before hitting send. There were questions about my installation, questions about my application, questions about if there was something that I would like to see in a future or upgraded model, but there was also information saying 'I noticed you purchased from Amazon, how did you hear of us and did you choose Amazon because?" sorts of things. It made me feel that while this is a company, they are still interested in their customer's needs and are customer service oriented. When I responded with a couple of ideas and a couple of questions, not only did the President of the company e-mail me back with answers, for the ones he did not have (concerning using it as a video server through my wireless network and/or outputing directly to my TV, he copied one of the tech savvy customer service folks who addressed my questions with helpful and detailed answers the same day!! That is excellent customer service in this day and age in my eyes, so I have no problems writing a positive review of both the product and the company. Yes. This product is a bit more expensive than other's out there, but from construction, to operation, to performance and company customer service, I would have no problem purchasing another one should I ever fill up 2TB (1.82TB of usuable space) with all our electronic media. Highly recommended if you are in the market for a serious, hardcore back up for all your digital needs.

The description of this product is misleading: "Microsoft Server, Linux, Mac and PC Compatible (eSATA model only)". This is not an eSATA model and does not work with Windows SBS 2011 server. When I connected to the Windows 7 professional machine, the drive was recognized as an external drive. But I had purchased this drive to backup Windows SBS2011 server and this drive was not recognized by Dell T410 server running SBS2011. When I called the iOSafe technical support, they informed me that this is the older model of 2 TB hard drive and the only model numbers starting with SH or SJ work on servers. The tech support guy informed me that only USB 2.0/eSATA drives work with Windows server, not USB 3.0 drives. ioSafe SoloPRO 2 TB USB 2.0/eSATA Fireproof and Waterproof External Hard Drive with 1 Year Data Recovery Service SH2000GB1YR (Black) is actually less expensive than this drive, as of now. This is what Buy with Confidence had to say "actually amazon made the item description under the listing, we are not able to modify it, thank you for letting us know this mistake, we will inform them." But it works fine with Windows 7 machines.

I'm actually using this connected to a Linux (CentOS 6) server via USB 3 and it's been fast and definitely the best bang-for-the-buck as far as mass protected storage. With a large amount of data using cloud services isn't as feasible as a locally-attached drive that can quickly and safely store large amounts of data. I've been thrilled with this so far and would recommend them. My only wish was that these came in a dual-drive (RAID) and/or NAS options so it could be a standalone device.

We were looking for a way to have a solid backup of our photos and videos. I cam across several video review of this product and the more I researched the more I thought it was just what we needed. We ordered from Amazon and 2 days later it was on the door step (you've got to love Amazon Prime). It was packaged very well and arrived inside a larger box which was also packaged well. This device is large and heavy...as would be expected for such protection. I plugged it in and thought I was ready to go. Unfortunately Windows 7 didn't think I was ready to go. It kept dropping the USB3 connection. After updating the USB3 driver and the USB3 firmware and also doing a fair bit of research on this issue, I finally figured out that there is a USB auto disconnect setting in Windows 7 that I needed to disable. I'm not sure if this is a feature of the ioSafe or if it was just a USB3 and Windows 7 problem, but I finally got it worked out and running. After getting it running it was fast and seemed to work well. I like the ability to be backward compatible to USB 2.0 devices. The only thing that annoys me just a little bit is that the fan is audible and my room is quiet, so I can clearly hear it. This isn't too much of a problem as I just turn on the drive when I want to run a backup, but it is somewhat annoying non-the-less. However, there is the new ioSafe option that does not have a fan, but I would rather have this one. Heat is the enemy to nearly all computer components and I tend to think that the actual hard drive in this version with the fan will be more durable than the version without, so the noise was a compromise I was willing to make. All in all, I would certainly recommend this product if you are serious about backing up your data.

I've been paranoid about loosing about a terabyte of photos and multimedia files and have tried everything, from hard drive cloning to several online backup services, but nothing quenched my theist for data security. The online products are a joke - it would take over 100 days to complete the initial backup. I had toyed with the idea of buying a data safe, but the Sentry safes offer only USB connections, limiting the hard drive capacity. Then I found this gem. It is a little pricey and quite heavy compared to traditional hard drives, but those aren't water- or fireproof. I plugged it into my Mac, formatted the drive, and Time Capsule is humming away. Definitely worth the piece of mind.