Hard-Drive Duplication At Sonix Speeds
Because Sonix's clever design makes the unit extremely portable, this is a must-have tool for system builders that travel to customer sites. Slightly larger than a SATA drive, Sonix arrives with external SATA and UDMA cable ports to connect target hard drives, including USB and parallel ports to connect to PCs and SCSI drives. Hard-drive power also is available right next to the external drive ports. Source drives, conversely, are placed inside the case to conserve space.
A Compact Flash port is available, and Logicube also sells adapters for 2.5-inch and 1.9-inch notebooks and Toshiba iPod drives, respectively.
A built-in fan keeps the Sonix's circuit as well as the source drive cool. CRN Test Center engineers found that the external 9-inch cables are long enough to comfortably set the drives on racks without having to dismount server drives from systems. In fact, engineers tested one drive on a rack on top of a server.
Connecting drives is straightforward and takes less than one minute. However, Sonix's UI is a little harder to work through the first time. Sonix's front panel arrives with indicator status lights, an OLED display and seven navigation buttons, as well as an alphanumeric keypad for labeling partitions.
Despite running into a little complexity in Sonix's menu system, engineers found the indicator lights quite useful because errors were quickly detected during a cloning operation—even though the cloning process took a mere second.
Changing configurations can be done through the Settings screen. By default, Sonix uses a Clever Clone mode that finds the fastest partition possible on drives. On FAT32 and NTFS configurations, Clever Clone scales all partitions on target drives so that they fill the entire drive. If scale-down is required due to smaller target drives, Clever Clone only is able to scale 55 percent of NTFS partitions.
Manual configuration of every step is available. Since having multiple partitions for each department is useful when configuring PCs, Sonix provides a Manager mode to store partitions on a single master drive. Relying on a single drive makes the job easy and portable when moving between departments. Sonix can store up to 24 partitions on a master drive. In addition, the Manager also can be used for backing up drive partitions.
Manual configuration requires verification of speed and cylinder head sector (CHS) modes. Sonix supports CHS modes for LBA, Large, including LBA 8.5 and LBA Large 8.5 settings. For more exotic settings, Sonix can shave off cylinders from target drives when using LBA Large 1 and Large 2 settings.
Similarly, speed settings can be adjusted to compensate for transfer-rate capacity. On UDMA-4 mode, Sonix tests for the lowest speeds and determines the fastest speeds. On lower modes, Sonix locks on designated speeds unless hard drives do not support the speed. The same goes for PIO-4 speeds and lower. Since Sonix supports Compact Flash cloning, technicians can set PIO-CPU speeds for solid-state devices and DiskOn Modules. PIO-CPU runs from 15 Mbytes per minute to 20 Mbytes per minute.
The easiest method to clone a drive is using Sonix's supported 1.x and 2.0 USB port, which enables cloning without having to remove hard drives. A bootable floppy or CD is required during the process. Once connected, PCs running Windows XP will detect master drives and will assign letters to them. After connecting, a virtual control panel will pop up on the attached PC, allowing technicians to control Sonix remotely.
When cloning target drives with master drives that run on the same networks, Logicube recommends installing NewSID on master drivers before starting cloning operations. Because Windows NT/2000/XP requires unique security identification numbers (SID) on folders and files, identical drives can cause erratic problems on a network. NewSID is available online at sysinternals.com.
Logicube provides free technical support for system builders for the first year, including one-year free parts and labor. Support is offered via phone and e-mail.