Product Reviews

When the Disk Jockey arrived in the MacUser office it really caught our attention. It's an intruiging-looking hardware gadget that's essentially a small metal box with some lights, a button and rotary switch, plus two ribbon cable connectors and power connector leads. Connect one or two naked internal hard drive mechanisms to it and you can perform a range of useful operations, including direct high-speed copying, comparing and disk checking, drive mirroring, and more. Plus, many operations don't even needing a host computer to run.

The Disk Jockey offers two different kinds of operation modes: either in conjunction with a computer or as a standalone device. When no computer is connected the Disk Jockey can copy one disk to another, make a block-for-block data comparison between two drives, and check the integrity of the disk structure itself. The Copy mode moves data as fast as the drive mechanisms themselves allow, so the throughput performance will vary. It did, however, duplicate one old 13GB mechanism to another in a little more than five minutes. It can also perform a single-pass and three-pass erase, writing zeros to every block on the connected drive. The three-pass erase conforms to the NSA requirements for data security. The Disk Jockey manual says drives erased in this way 'cannot easily be recovered', which is an understatement if ever there was one.

When the Disk Jockey is connected to a computer via one of the FireWire ports or the USB port (USB 1.1 and 2), connected drives can be mounted individually, combined so that two appear as one volume the size of both drives added together, or mirrored. When mirrored, data is copied to both mechanisms simultaneously, managed by the controller in the Disk Jockey unit. If a drive failure occurs with one device, the other remains intact and ready to use.

These modes are selected by turning a dial to a number that corresponds to the mode as listed in a chart on the side of the device. The dial could do with a clearer point indicator, but using it is simplicity

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itself. A power button on the top switches the device on and, in the computer-free modes, then initiates the chosen operation. Three LEDs give basic but adequate feedback, and a buzzer gives alerts in case of problems and when processes finish.

The Disk Jockey is designed to work with 3.5in IDE drive mechanisms that support Ultra DMA (Direct Memory Access), which in practise means any IDE drive that works in any desktop Mac from the last half decade or so. Drive speed isn't an issue, apart from being the determining factor in throughput. We used a number of different drives, including units scavenged from retired production Macs and new high-capacity drives, and the Disk Jockey handled them all.

It works with PCs just as well as with Macs, as the device simply presents the hard disk drive or drives to it in the appropriate, standard manner. It also doesn't care what disk format is used, including old-style HFS, HFS+ (with or without journaling), UFS, NFS, the Windows-specific FAT32, and so on.

There are limits to the Disk Jockey's magic, but this is simply down to the way disks work rather than any weakness in the product. As the copy process works at the data block level, copying from a large disk to a smaller one isn't possible. Going from small to large is possible, but the extra space can't be used by Macs until the disk is erased again, and Windows users have to delete the missing space and reassign it before it can be used.

The Disk Jockey's manual was short, to the point, and, considering how dull this subject could have been, actually very easy to read. Our only real quibble lies with the connectors themselves. As they're totally standard IDE data and power connectors, they do tend to stick fast in the sockets of the drives. We did soon find the sweet point of pushing the plugs in far enough to connect but not so far that they got too firmly lodged. However, custom grips for helping pull the plugs out would have helped. The ribbon cables used for the data connectors are tougher than they appear, but we'd still have felt a little happier if they'd been given a bit more protection.

Having a Disk Jockey on your desk with various internal drive mechanisms hanging off the cables and whirring merrily away will brand you as a serious technical wizard. It isn't the prettiest bit of technology, and if you don't deal with disk drives beyond using the one in your Mac, this isn't something you'll need. However, those who could make use of this will know by now whether they want it. This thing makes life easier for IT staff, technical editors and heavy-duty data users everywhere.