Since I had to build my wife a new PC to finally get her off of Windows 98SE, I took this golden opportunity to give the Disk Jockey a workout! This covered my butt in two ways; 1) I had a backup of my wife's hard drive and could put her old system back together in a flash, and 2) Even if everything worked just fine, I have a backup of every file on her system, in case she accidentally deletes something she doesn't mean to. :-)
Setting up the Disk Jockey could only be made simpler if it came with someone to do it for you. Just plug your source drive in on the side that says Disk 1. You can tell which side that is by the big, blue arrow that has the word "Copy" in the middle of it. The arrow is a graphical representation of the flow of data. Then, plug your destination drive into the other side (Disk 2). Place the drives on the provided electrostatic mats, plug in the power supply to the Disk Jockey, press the blue button once to spin the drives up and then a second time to start copying data. Once all of the data has been copied over, the Disk Jockey shuts itself off.
There are a couple of things to be aware of when using the Disk Jockey to copy one drive to another. One, the destination drive MUST be at least the same size as the source drive. This is because the Disk Jockey does a sector by sector copy. It doesn't care about file systems, partition sizes, or anything else. It just copies the data straight over from the source drive onto the destination drive.
The second thing to keep in mind is that you will loose some or all of the data currently stored on your destination drive when using the Disk Jockey to clone a hard drive. Currently, there is no way to tell the Disk Jockey to put the data you're copying in a particular place when using it in this manner, so make sure there isn't anything you absolutely have to have on your destination drive that you haven't backed up already!
Conclusion
Diskology's Disk Jockey is a great tool to have around, especially if you build or upgrade a lot of PCs! It takes about 20 minutes to fully clone a 40GB hard drive, which means the Disk Jockey can save you a ton of time. Plus, the Disk Jockey can also be used as an external hard drive by attaching one or two drives to it and plugging it in to your PC or Mac using the included USB or FireWire cables! As an added bonus, you can even use the Disk Jockey to wipe drives clean!
While the Disk Jockey is really handy, that handiness comes at a fairly steep price. A new one will run you $329.00. That does not include the available SATA ($39.95) or 2.5" adapters ($10.00), so if you need to work with those types of drives, be prepared to spend a little more. On the plus side, you can get display/refurbished units from Diskology for $249.00.
Other than the price, the only things I'd like to see are the ability to copy to a specific location on the destination drive and the ability to copy selected data from the source drive. I realize that this will mean a significant change in the Disk Jockey's design, so maybe Diskology will consider creating a Disk Jockey Deluxe with these features.
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