*** This review is written by my resident geek, and awesome hubby, Ryan Brady. His technical blog can be found at RyanBrady.org. While he is a technical writer, and perfect for this review, the product reviewed is something everyone can use. Especially those photo happy moms like myself, who would probably lose their mind if anything happened to those years worth of photos of their little ones! Enjoy!!!***
Monica asked me if I wanted to review the ioSafe hard drive and I jumped at the chance.  I watched a video online where they put the drive in a fire, soaked it with a fire hose, dropped it from several feet in the air, and then attempted to crush one of these drives with some heavy duty construction equipment and they were still able to read the data off of the drive.
Our review model is the ioSafe Solo. It’s 512 GB, usb 2.0. It’s Fireproof up to 1550 Deg F for 30 minutes and Waterproof up to 10 ft for 72 hours..
The registration process is pretty effortless. Â It took about 1 minute to complete. Â The unit arrived with a small yellow piece of paper with a URL, instructions and a sticker with the serial number on it. Â I visited the URL and was presented with a simple form. Â It worked first time without error.
After completing the first form, I was offered the ability to upgrade the length of time to receive the ioSafe Data Recovery Service (DRS). Every ioSafe product comes with complimentary one time use data and hardware recovery support.  For our review model, the available features for the DRS are:
- One time use, no questions
- Any loss, any reason
- One point of contact
- Free global, mail-in repair coverage
- Free replacement hardware
- Pre-load recovered data
- Forensic Data Recovery coverage
The DRS looks like an amazing service. It comes with one year by default, and you can upgrade to either 3 or 5 years. The DRS is what helps to set this product apart from other products in the market.  Pricing is 3 years for $49.99 and 5 years for $99.99.
The drive showed up with NTFS formatting as the default.  Setting up for use with the Mac was easy.  I used the disk utility to reformat the drive to FAT.  It took a few minutes to complete.  So far I’ve completed some unscientific tests for copying data to the drive and it seems to perform well so far.
I do have some questions after getting my hands on this unit.  What happens after the DRS period has ended? If you have an event outside of the DRS period what can you do?  Are there any options either from ioSafe or from 3rd parties that would be compatible with this hardware?  An observation: It would be great if there was an additional per event option from ioSafe.
Now I just need to get the courage to submerge this device in water!
*With the recent flooding here in North Carolina, so many people lost so many things, and I just know that some of them had to have lost important data on their computers. If any of them would have had an ioSafe, they would’ve had an excellent chance of saving their important files.
You can check out the ioSafe Solo drives and all of their available products at the ioSafe website.
**Disclosure: The product shown in this review was provided to me, at no cost for the sole purpose of product testing and review. Opinions expressed on this site are my own and are never influenced by compensation, monetary or otherwise.