New: Fireproof, Waterproof Hard Drives

ioSafe Uses SolidWorks to Design Disaster-Proof Computer Hardware; Company Saves $15,000 and Three Months

CONCORD, Mass., USA, March 1, 2010 – Your product designs. Your customer records. Your precious photos and video. These are things that insurance companies can’t protect, but ioSafe can.

The private Auburn, Calif., company, growing at 400 percent annually, uses SolidWorks® CAD software to design disaster-proof data storage devices for computer systems of any size, whether netbooks or Fortune 500 data centers. Like an aircraft’s black box, an ioSafe internal or external hard drive safeguards valuable data in the event of a fire, flood, building collapse, or other catastrophe. It also performs the basic tasks that less fortified data storage drives do – backing up your important data in event of run-of-the-mill computer crash or virus. An ioSafe drive is a “disaster plan in a box” for the vast majority small and medium businesses struggling to protect their irreplaceable data.

The ioSafe Solo is the company’s most popular offering, a $150 external hard drive for any business or individuals using an external hard drive for data storage. Like its siblings, it’s built to protect data in fires up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes and can be submerged up to 10 feet for 3 days in the ocean without data loss. ioSafe used SolidWorks to tackle the product’s core design challenge: enabling heat-producing hard drives to stay cool in a water-protected, insulated, fireproof container.

“SolidWorks Flow Simulation is perfect for designing an airflow to maximize cooling and minimize fan noise,” said Robb Moore, ioSafe CEO. “We saved $15,000 on product development by making virtual prototypes and performing simulations. The biggest benefit, however, was reducing our time to market by 75 percent – down to one month instead of four – thereby reclaiming three months of potentially lost sales of a high-demand product. What we’ve done wouldn’t be possible without CAD and simulation to quickly iterate virtual prototypes.”

Moore invested in SolidWorks because engineers can learn it much more quickly than other software ioSafe has tried. “As a company owner, finding quality engineers and getting them up to speed quickly is a big expense,” Moore said. “SolidWorks gives me the upper hand. It takes about one-fifth of the time to get new employees to the point where they can use the powerful features, add value, work quickly, and contribute to the team.”