RDX (disk)

Lore & Background

RDX removable disk technology uses shock-proof 2.5-inch Serial ATA hard disk drives enclosed in cartridges. The cartridges are advertised to sustain a 1 m drop onto a concrete floor and offer an archival lifetime up to 30 years, with transfer speeds up to 650 GB/hr. In May 2011, Tandberg Data GmbH of Germany acquired the RDX business including intellectual property and key members of ProStor's RDX engineering team.

Hard disk cartridge capacities range from 320 GB to 5 TB. Solid-state cartridges run from 64 GB to 512 GB per medium, doubling each increment, or as WORM media from 320 GB to 1 TB. Dell 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, a formerly competing technology. Both allow an ordinary user to remove and replace the cartridge without special training. However, REV places the read/write heads in the drive instead of inside the cartridge, requiring a mechanical loading mechanism to insert heads through a physical hole. RDX eliminates this by turning the drive into a dock whose loading mechanism simply establishes an electronic connection to the cartridge.

Reader's Guide

RDX's significance lies in its design as a direct replacement for tape storage, offering the convenience of removable cartridges with the random-access speed and reliability of hard disk drives. By placing the read/write heads inside the cartridge itself, RDX simplified the drive into a dock, avoiding the mechanical complexity and potential failure points of competing technologies like Iomega REV. This approach made the cartridges shock-proof and allowed for easy user replacement without special training. The technology's acquisition by Tandberg Data in 2011 helped sustain its presence in the market, and its adoption by Dell under the RD1000 trade name brought it to a wider enterprise audience. The range of capacities—from 320 GB to 5 TB for HDD cartridges and up to 512 GB for SSDs—allowed it to serve various backup and archival needs. Its advertised 30-year archival lifetime and drop resistance positioned it as a durable alternative to tape, though the internal drive's inaccessibility outside the cartridge ensured data remained tied to the RDX ecosystem.

Did You Know?

• RDX cartridges are advertised to survive a 1 m drop onto concrete.
• The technology was developed by ProStor Systems Incorporated in 2004.