Hard disk duplications ICS – white paper

Hard drive duplication is the process of copying the contents of one hard drive to another hard drive or multiple drives. The first hard drive duplication units were introduced to the market in the late Eighties by Intelligent Computer Solutions, Inc. The technology developed for these first units was a crucial element in the process of automating the mass production of personal computers. This automation made it possible for manufacturers to offer consumers “ready to use” computers at an affordable price, and computer sales were driven up from thousands a year to 100 million a year.

Aside from the computer manufacturers’ obvious need for hard drive duplication there is an entire spectrum of non PC products that use hard dives as well. Products like: TV cable boxes, video games, medical equipment, communication equipment, etc.
The manufacturers of these types of products need a way to clone the content of the internal hard drive just as the computer manufacturers do. Other applications that require an efficient way of coping data include: IT departments of organizations that maintain and update their own computers, service organizations, IT consultants, and last but not least, computer forensics investigators.

The diversity of the applications requiring hard drive duplication spawned a variety of solutions:

Hardware solutions
Ranging from low cost hardware units (including computer based devices or simple stand alone units that copy from one hard drive, sector by sector, to another similar hard drive) to more advanced units that can use intelligent copy mode (IQ copy) which only copies the occupied cluster and even scales the partitions of the target drives. Such advanced units can copy from one hard drive to multiple hard drives and from smaller to larger or from larger to smaller hard drives. Some of the most popular such devices are the ICS Image MASSter line (Image MASSter). The IM4008I Hard Drive Duplicator, equipped with intelligent copy (IQ Copy) or Smart Copy duplicates 8 hard drives from 1 master. The IM4004I Hard Drive Duplicator, copies to 4 hard drives and the Solo 3 (the hand held duplicator) duplicate 2 targets simultaneously.

To read the full white paper visit www.ics-iq.com.