RDX is a disk-based removable
storage format intended as a replacement of
tape storage. RDX
removable disk technology consists of portable disk cartridges and an RDX dock. RDX cartridges are shock-proof 2.5-inch
Serial ATA
SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host adapter, host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PAT ...
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
s and are advertised to sustain a drop onto a concrete floor and to offer an archival lifetime up to 30 years and transfer up to 650GB/hr.
The technology was developed by ProStor Systems Incorporated in 2004. In May 2011,
Tandberg Data
Tandberg Data GmbH was a company focused on data storage products, especially streamers, headquartered in Dortmund, Germany. They were the only company still selling drives that use the QIC (also known as SLR) and VXA formats, but also produc ...
GmbH of Germany acquired the RDX business including intellectual property and key members of ProStor's RDX engineering team.
Hard disk cartridges capacities are 320 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB, 4 TB, and 5 TB.
Solid-state cartridges' capacities run from 64 GB to 512 GB per medium, doubling each increment; or as
WORM
Worms are many different distantly related bilateria, bilateral animals that typically have a long cylindrical tube-like body, no limb (anatomy), limbs, and usually no eyes.
Worms vary in size from microscopic to over in length for marine ...
media from 320 GB to 1 TB.
Dell
Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...
markets RDX cartridges under the trade name RD1000; a teardown reveals they contain a standard laptop drive enclosed with silicone bumpers, but the drive cannot be accessed if removed from the cartridge and interfaced by another means.
RDX is sometimes compared with
Iomega REV
REV is a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega, released in 2004.http://web.archive.org/web/20040604143936/http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/review.php?reviewId=404
The small removable disks store 35, 70, or 120 gigabytes (GB) and are hard ...
, a formerly competing technology. Both technologies allow an ordinary user to remove and replace the cartridge containing the recording medium without special training. However REV places the read/write heads in the drive instead of inside the cartridge, which means that the drive's loading/unloading mechanism must mechanically insert heads into and remove them from the cartridge through a physical hole.
By eliminating the need for this, RDX turns the drive into a dock—whose loading mechanism simply establishes an electronic connection to the cartridge.
See also
*
Linear Tape-Open
Linear Tape-Open (LTO), also known as the LTO Ultrium format, is a magnetic tape data storage technology used for backup, data archiving, and data transfer. It was originally developed in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the pro ...
*
Optical Disc Archive
Optical Disc Archive (ODA) is an archival storage technology developed by Sony. A single cartridge is designed to hold as many as 12 optical discs, each of which are similar to, but not directly compatible with, Blu-ray or Blu-Ray-BDXL systems, ...
References
External links
* {{citation
, url=http://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/media/rdx-media/
, title=RDX QuikStor
, publisher=Overland-Tandberg
, accessdate=2020-07-06
Hard disk computer storage
Computer-related introductions in 2004