Rohan Mathawan
People are working at home more than ever these days with the current Coronavirus situation. These home entrepreneurs can benefit from inexpensive equipment to make their work-life a bit easier and more efficient. For example, 3D printers are hot right now and inexpensive to buy. However, for those who do not make a physical product, maybe something more useful would be a USB flash drive duplicator. This would be especially true for software developers, IT managers, and marketing executives.
Many will immediately think about internet download options like DropBox, but the online download is not always the answer. Here are several scenarios where data on a flash drive is preferred to a download link:
An IT manager must provide an operating system installation and recovery USB disk. The IT manager must plan for a solution where the user might not have internet access to restore their computer, in this case, the best option is having a USB flash drive with the data needed.
Another example is a software developer who must deploy a large software package to their clients. The software developer doesn’t know the bandwidth or download speed of the user, and thus must provide a physical device. It is also possible the user is remote and doesn’t have access to the internet, say, for example, a large boat at sea, or a government installation deep in the mountains, like a park ranger facility.
Nexcopy introduced a mini-sized USB flash drive duplicator that will copy Gigabytes of data in just minutes. This small system is one master to four targets standalone copier system. There is no PC required and the device will copy 1GB of data to all targets in about one minute. This means a 10GB data load would take just over ten minutes.
Consider the following bullet points for this min USB duplicator system:
- Asynchronous copy mode, all the time
- The binary copier will copy any format; FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, HFS, Ext2,3,4, Proprietary
- Binary CRC verification algorithm
- Quick Erase and Full Erase for disk sanitization
- Four language modes in the LCD menu
- USB speed benchmark utility
- Firmware upgradeable
The erase feature will write random zeros and ones to the entire memory ensuring no data is left on the flash memory drive. This is a nice feature to guarantee data is removed from the USB with no chance of the data being recovered. Formatting a flash drive doesn’t remove data but erasing the drive will. The quick erase will scrub certain portions of the drive so some data could remain, but most likely corrupted and unable to recover. The full erase function will randomly write binary zero and one data to the entire memory of the flash drive. By doing this random write sequence, it would be impossible for even the most sophisticated forensics recovery software to restore data from the device.
From the setup mode, the duplicator can toggle between four languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese and Simplified Chinese.
The USB benchmark speed is a great tool to figure out the quality of media one is using. This is particularly important when dealing with promotional quality media, as promo memory is very unstable. With a home entrepreneur, there is a bit of a learning curve to where to buy quality flash memory and this tool is invaluable to determine USB quality. The easiest way to determine quality is by testing the write speed – the slower they drive, the less reliable it will be. The USB flash duplicator will write about 15MBs of random data to determine the average read and write speed. If the USB memory has a write speed of 4MB/second or lower, it’s not good quality. If the write speed is above 8MB/second for USB 2.0 media and above 20MB/second write speed for USB 3.0 media, it is of better quality memory.
The USB104SA duplicator made by Nexcopy is a backward compatible and works with USB 1.0, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 flash drives. The duplicator will write to the device as fast as the memory will allow. The best write speeds will result from the faster drives, which would be USB 3.0 flash drives.