With the cost of cloud computing or conventional enterprise storage beyond the budget of many small remote or home offices, Cirago offers an inexpensive data storage alternative. Using a small USB docking station that accepts both 2.5-inch laptop hard drives and standard 3.5-inch system drives that use a SATA connection, reports Information Week, a hard drive plugged into the dock makes the drive become available in much the same way that plugging a USB thumb drive into a system works.
“Of course, you might ask why wouldn’t you just use USB thumb drives? Hey, I love USB drives but in the grand scheme of things they aren’t that big. Most affordable ones are under 64 GB and those few that are larger than 100 GB can be fairly expensive. However, when I was testing the Cirago, I had six spare drives sitting around that I could use in the device and even the oldest (about five years old) had more than 200 GB of space. For a small office, that provides some pretty nice options for backing up, storing, and sharing large amounts of data. At under $50, it’s not a large investment for any small office. And, finally, you can easily rescue data from dead systems and find a use for all of those old drives you have sitting around.”
