Foothills firm focuses on data safety Drive made to endure a variety of disasters
By: Gloria Young , Journal Staff Writer Sunday, July 10, 2005 2:02 AM PDT
As the father of a new baby, Robb Moore took lots of pictures with his digital camera, storing the precious moments of his son's milestones on his home computer. But then the engineer began to worry, "What if he lost those photographs in a house fire or other disaster?"
Robb Moore, CEO of ioSafe, Inc., left, and senior mechanical designer Steve Goldsberry have invented and built a disaster-ready hard drive, which can protect data from extreme conditions like a fire or flood. Photo by Ben Furtado/Auburn Journal
That thought, plus concerns about protecting the digital data collected in his consulting business, prompted him to develop the Disaster Ready Drive, an external hard drive packaged in a fire, flood and theft-resistance housing.
"Everything can be replaced, but if you lose your photos, it's like losing your family history," he said this week.
Moore, 37, is a Northern California native who moved to Auburn because he has always wanted to live here, he said.
After earning a mechanical engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, he spent several years with Able Engineering, an aerospace company, working on mechanisms for NASA's space program. He then moved to the Bay Area, eventually ending up working for a consulting company, doing production design, he said.
From there, it was just a stepping-stone to establishing his own engineering and product development consulting company, Kollabra, in 1996.
For his latest venture, the Disaster Ready Drive, he has started a second company called ioSafe.
Moore explained that the idea for the protected hard drive evolved over a period of time. After he started Kollabra, he purchased a fireproof safe for the company data, with a lid that could be closed in case of fire. That started him brainstorming about how to leave the lid closed at all times (without overheating the computer and losing the data).
"As an engineer, nothing is good enough," he said. "The trick with the device is that during normal operation with the electronics contained inside the safe, there's good ventilation," he said. "When there's a fire, it triggers a shut-down like a turtle, to weather the firestorm."
After a house or business fire, firefighters can extract the black box-type object, which then can be sent back to the Moore's company, he said.
The company extracts the protected hard drive from the outer fire-damaged casing, and puts the data on a new drive to be forwarded back to the customer, Moore explained.
"It is a disaster plan in a box," he said.
The product is geared to the small-business market.
"If the hard drive crashes and I'm running a small business, I can't afford to hire someone to keep track of my data," he said.
Michael Spencer, a civil engineer with Bellecci and Associates of Roseville and a former college roommate of Moore, agrees.
"I see this as being valuable because it offers real-time backup and is a stand-along hard drive," Spencer said. "I have a server that backs up every single night and I take home the backup magnetic tape every two weeks. If I lost my magnetic tape and something went wrong at the office, I'd be out of luck."
At Sun Dance Computers in Auburn, computer technician Chris Wilson could see benefits to the device, as well as alternatives to protecting information stored on a hard drive.
"If it works well and is reasonably priced, it is a good idea," he said. "But you could also store taped backups offsite or burn information to CDs, unless there's larger amounts of data."
The device, which costs $1,800 to $2,400 depending on the options, weighs about 45 pounds and is 6 inches by 11 inches by 18 inches. The patent is pending, Moore said. He added that he has successfully tested the device the device at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half.
In preparation for launching the Disaster Ready Drive on the market, which he said he plans to do this Friday, Moore has set up an office on Lindbergh Street in the Auburn Airport Industrial Park, and put together a staff of five - a designer and four engineers. He also has contracted with several manufacturing firms to produce the parts, which will be assembled in Auburn.
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