Oh RDX, not RDX
I thought you ment RDX as in Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine
Tandberg Data looks to have a major success in waiting on its hands with the ProStor RDX QuikStor product - 90,000 drive docks have been sold in less than two years. ProStor's RDX is a removable cartridge containing a 2.5-inch notebook hard drive, up to 500GB in capacity, in a ruggedised case. It is slotted into an internal or …
I've not used tape since I had a VAX, and that was a while back, but can you not boot from tape any more?
What is actually meant by "bare metal"? Mostly a full system restore will involve putting an O/S on the machine to get it to connect to the networked backup storage anyway, and then it's no longer "bare metal" is it?
Nothing special about it, it's just disc enclosure plus some off-the-shelf backup software. Similar product, but without bundled software, is Crucial SK01 . Not only you do not pay for the software you do not need (there is plenty to choose from), you can also put any 2.5" disc inside.
The 300GB cartridge has a street price of around £250, that's over 4x the price of a bare 2.5" drive. There is no clever proprietory connections or interface, or even sophisticated electronics in the cartridge. It's just a mainstream 5400rpm 2.5" drive in a plastic case. It should be possible to crack open the case and replace the drive with a faster 7200 rpm drive to increase read/write speeds, or, maybe a Velociraptor, either costing less than what Tandberg charge for an average performance drive.
Don't get me wrong, RDX is an excellent product and very reliable, but Tandberg are having a laugh charging £250 for a simple plastic case surrounding a £50 drive.
The software seems to be windoze only, and the web site for the product is remarkably light on details - what the host interface is, for example, and whether it is hot-unpluggable, or whether it has to be software released first.
Your text says that the module is ruggedised, but laptop style hard disks are pretty delicate things, and I would have thought it would take quite a lot to make them really reliable enough for the purpose.
It seems to be a non-product, really. Not an el-reg story at all, just advertising.