What Does Fire Insurance Cover?

Definitely NOT Your Hard Drive.
Every month as a homeowner or commercial property owner you'll pay premiums to protect your investment (high risk areas will pay even more). Although it would be great if a fire never happened, the risk is there. After you have filed your claim, the insurance policy will be able to replace your furniture and house, but not your family photo album. Digital photos stored on your computer should be backed up no matter what, now you have the option to store these photos in a fire and flood protected (think fire hoses) hard drive. This type of insurance is priceless. How much would you pay to get your hard drive back?

It can be argued that the majority of computer users and business owners do not back up their data at all. Those that do are paying for external hard drives that offer little more than 'blinking lights' and 'flashy packaging,' offering some value but certainly not insurance against fire and flood. ioSafe Solo hard drives have become a trusted brand for data backup by businesses and personal users worldwide. With ISO estimating that fire losses associated with homeowners insurance claims (including FAIR Plans) accounted for 58 percent of total insured fire losses in 2007. (Source: ISO ) fire coverage is an important part of your planning.

The next time you visit your local agent, think about the risk calculator that they are using and consider if your data is also worth protecting.

What is the Cost of Flood Insurance?

There are many ways to assess the true cost of loss from a flood. First you can look at the cost of monthly premiums (determined by a number of factors). This includes the amount and type of coverage being purchased, the location of the building (commercial or residential) and flood zone as well as the design and age of the structure itself.

To determine rates and policy costs you will certainly need to visit your local insurance agent to determine exact costs.

Computer Data and Loss From Flood
What's on your hard drive? This question needs to also be answered when considering your options for flood insurance. Precious family photos and business data are worth backing up and its in your best interest to backup to a hard drive that offers both flood and fire protection. ioSafe, the manufacturer of fire safe and floodproof hard drives offers an elegant and inexpensive way to backup your data and provide protection and coverage that your insurance policy cannot replace - a lost hard drive.

Hard drives are susceptible to damage from water, sprinklers and submersion from a flood, often leaving them inoperable and unrecoverable. By investing in a flood protected hard drive you can recover the third most important part of your home (after your family and pets) and that is your digital photo album and business data.

For more information on Coverage, Loss Paid, Premiums and more - vist the FEMA Website

Brands of Hard Drives for Review

There are several choices for hard drive storage today and choosing the best option for your business or personal digital storage isn't always an easy task. For your convenience we have compiled a list of the best brand name manufacturers of hard drives for review and comparison.


LaCie®
Your best source for high performance, rugged and designer style hard drives. LaCie® builds high performance storage products that are reliable and attractive additions to your buiness or home media entertainment center.

ioSafe
Fireproof and waterproof hard drive manufacturer that offers 3.5" internal drives for computers or servers as well as USB desktop storage with RAID or a NAS storage server. Compare ioSafe, Lacie® and Seagate®

CMS Desktop Hard Drives
CMS offers a wide variety of desktop hard disks. Our desktop hard disk solutions are available with universal mounting brackets to fit most desktop and server computers. We also have custom solutions for special configurations.


Imation® Solid State Drives from Imation® are industry leading solid state storage technology that provide an solution for drive-intensive applications and environments that experience heat and cold temperatures.

Samsung®
From optical disk drives to standard hard disk, Samsung® builds the best for desktops or mobile applications including surveillance or DVR and the large enterprise.

SimpleTech® portable hard drives that are built from recycled aluminum and bamboo offer both designer class and green storage. Find high performance read / write speeds and free online backup with purchase.

Buffalo Technology™
Award winning network storage and external hard drives offer easy file access and sharing including flash drive storage for portable secure backup.

Fujitsu Hard Drives
Enterprise class performance and capacity in a small form factor make this the choice for fire safe hard drives safes for paper business documents and removable computer media from Sentry Security group.

HP™
Data storage products, solutions and services for storage infrastructure, networking and information management.

Western Digital®
Manufacturer of several brands and types of hard disk drives for the home entertainment / media server market as well as external storage

Maxtor®
From DAS (direct attached storage) to Network storage drives this division of Seagate Technology® makes some of the most reliable hard drives built for the home, office or enterprise

IOGEAR®
Pocket card readers, USB 2.0 hubs SATA hard drive enclosures for desktop solutions.

Toshiba®
Internal hard drives in a 2.5" or 1.8" form factor for consumer electronics, laptops, and portable mobile storage for mobile applications or environments.

Olixir®
Rugged external hard drives for military spec applications are the most durable and reliable disk drives for use as portable storage. With patented shock and vibration protection the drives can survive a fall or drop and now include optional encryption technology in Firewire, USB and SATA versions that are engineered for extreme heat and cold temperature and still stay operable.

Hitachi®
Offers a wide range of products in many sizes with hard drive capacity, performance and reliability.

Kanguru Portable HD
High quality, high speed hard drives work with PCs, Notebooks and Macs! Fast and affordable, Kanguru Drives are a great way to increase your computers storage capacity! Offering external hard drives, removable hard drives and even scalable storage solutions.

Apricorn Portable External Hard Drives
Rugged storage that is small enough to fit in your pocket with 1.8" external disk drives, DVD drives or portable floppy disks are high capacity and built with the latest technology.


Additional Reviews of Hard Drives include;
ioSafe Demo Wows Journalists

Drowning and Boiling Your Hard Drive. ioSafe proves best!

PC Magazine Review of USB External Hard Drive

Comparison of External Hard Drives

Hard drive storage is generally a simple purchase process. Either your hard drive crashes and you need a new disk drive or you ran out of storage and need to buy a USB external or network storage. Now you have just one dilemma...which storage device do you purchase given all the choices?

There are three basic things that you need to remember when comparing hard drive brands and that is features, price and warranty.

Features
This includes connectivity such as SATA, IDE and USB or network attached (ethernet connection). Most external storage drives are USB 2.0 or Ethernet, with USB being the most common for desktop applications at the home or office.

Other features include color, push button backup or flashing LED lights. Some hard drives are even fireproof and waterproof for just a few dollars more.

Price
Most hard drives in the 500 GB range start around $99 and move up to around $129. If you catch a holiday sale you can easily drop that number down to $80.

Warranty
Generally speaking all hard drives come with a one to three year warranty. Pretty standard across the board. Some hard drives also include a data recovery service warranty on top of that. This means that if you hard drive crashes (for any reason) that the company will pay to have the data recovered at a third party forensic recovery service such as OnTrack or DriveSavers. This added warranty protection is a true bonus for anyone in the market for an external hard drive.

A new hard drive on the market is the ioSafe Solo, a fire safe and waterproof USB drive that costs a few dollars more than a regular hard disk. It comes with a 3 year warranty and a $1,000 data recovery service with purchase price. We all know that the drive will fail at some point in time, so the extra dollars are worth the hassle when the drive crashes or your computer says goodbye.