Duplicate up to five HDDs simultaneously

A standalone device that needs to computer to operate, the 1:5 HDD Cruiser will duplicate up to 5 HDDs simultaneously. It can also sanitize up to 6 HDDs to assure that confidential data is unreadable.

Clearly, a nice tool to have around if you're an IT professional who upgrades hard drives for multiple systems.

The device is equipped with quick load drive bays so no external cables are needed. Just load your source drive in the top bay and load up to 5 target drives in the in the remaining bays. The 1:5 HDD Cruiser will copy the exact content and format of the source drive to the 5 targets.

You can add site-licensed operating systems and application programs as well, so that a system upgrade is completed with just a drive swap.

The device's drive bays are made of aluminum for "optimum thermal conductivity" minimizing any overheating issues. Each drive bay has internal non-scratch SATA connectors designed for greater than 50,000 swap cycles, the company says.

As for security, the HDD Cruiser provides three options for sanitizing hard disc drives. In the company's own words:

• 1) One pass data overwrite is to write zeroes to every block on the hard drive.
• 2) Three pass data overwrite writes one pass of zeros, one pass of 1s and one pass of a randomly generated pattern to every block on the hard drive. You have the option to verify the random pattern to provide assurance that the overwrite was completed.
• 3) Seven pass DoD 5220.22-M has been derived from the Department of Defense 5220.22-M standard for secure overwriting of hard disk drive. After the overwrite process the hard drives appear to a computer as new drives without initialization or formatting.

The HDD cruiser has an estimated retail price of $1049. [Where to get it][More hard drive duplicators on ZDNet]