inXtron Taurus LCM: External HDD Enclosure

Storing  digital content has become quite common. But as more and more people add more and more external hard drives to their digital library it can often become difficult to distinguish one hard drive from another. While hard drives often last a very long time, they are by no means guaranteed to last a lifetime or anything close to that. But, how do you know if your external hard drive is in need of replacement? For many people, they do not know until it is too late. A failed hard drive can be not only a major headache, but also extremely frustrating or even saddening if important documents, photos or videos are suddenly lost. While some causes of drive failure cannot be anticipated or avoided, there are ways of keeping track of the health of your hard drives.

Based in Taipei, Taiwan, inXtron, Inc., manufacturer of hard drive enclosures for almost 20 years has created external enclosures that are SMART. By adding special software to the enclosures they have taken much of the guesswork and headache out of determining drive health and age.

 
The new Taurus LCM from inXtron is a robust aluminum enclosure complete with a fan to regulate temperature and keep drives cool while running for long periods of time. It also has an LCD display that informs users of the amount of space on the drive, the temperature and the name of the drive. Included with the Taurus is inXtron’s SMART AP software. This software interface provides information about the age, size, temperature and overall health of the installed hard drives.

The software ‘dashboard’ illustrates the information in a new way. Instead of a bunch of numbers, the inXtron SMART AP provides an interface similar to a car’s dashboard. It shows the amount of space on the disks as well as the amount of space used in a speedometer-like format. It also shows the number of times the disks have been powered on and off and how long the drives have been in use in an odometer-like format. Below that is other useful information about the drives, such as the brand, model, serial number, total capacity and amount of free space. The temperature control GUI uses a speedometer-like format to show the current temperature. It also shows the temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit, as well the highest temperature recorded on the drive. RAID settings and other drive configurations such as e-mail alerts can also be set up and monitored through the SMART AP GUI.

The advanced hardware and software features of the Taurus LCM made it a test winner in a recent German tech magazine comparison.