A leading developer and manufacturer of "Prosumers' Choice" solutions for the Blu-ray, DVD/CD, Flash, HDD, USB duplicating, and DVD/CD publishing markets, Aleratec Inc., has been awarded the Military Embedded Systems Magazine Editor’s Choice distinction for its innovative new stand alone HDD Cruiser™, a hard disk drive sanitizer and duplicator all in one unit. The HDD Cruiser will simultaneously sanitize up to 4 HDDs to assure that all confidential data is unreadable. It can also duplicate up to 3 HDDs simultaneously. The sanitizing capability is particularly important with the rapid advancement hard drives, upgrading drives in systems is commonplace and it is important that confidential data is removed from the old drives before they are recycled or discarded. No computer is required for operation because the HDD Cruiser is a stand alone unit, so there is no need to tie up a computer for hours running complex software to duplicate or sanitize hard disk drives.

    The Aleratec HDD Cruiser provides 3 options for sanitizing hard disc drives, each providing a more advanced level of security.
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 overwrite. Three pass and Seven pass overwrites have been derived from the Department of Defense 5220.22-M specification for secure overwriting of hard disk drive. After the overwrite process is finished the hard drives appear to a computer as new drives without initialization or formatting.

    The dual purpose HDD Cruiser features a powerful stand alone controller so no computer is required for operation, because HDD duplication or sanitizing can tie up a computer for hours. The HDD Cruiser has individual, removable, locking, aluminum drive trays. In both sanitizing and duplicating the controller must access the entire capacity of each drive, so the drives must run for extended periods and cooling is of utmost importance. The HDD Cruiser has 10 ultra quiet cooling fans and the “only from Aleratec” aluminum drive trays offer the best possible thermal conductivity. The locking trays offer important tamper resistance to help prevent interruption of either a duplicating or sanitizing operation.