10-27-09

Why Own a Burly Enclosure?
by Rick Stephens

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Support!

  First and foremost, we come with our storage products. That means when you need help, we will answer that email or phone call and do our very best to get you back up and running soonest. We won't ask if the enclosure is still in warranty before we'll talk with you. This is all we do, and we have quite a number of years of experience to offer when you have a problem or when you need set up or purchase advice. We consider it our honor to take care of our customers.

Solid Design

  Frankly, most enclosures on the market today have missed the most fundamental engineering principle in their design: they don't maintain basic environmental conditions for drive longevity - which leads ultimately to your data's security. The bare minimum that a drive enclosure should provide is stability in power and temperature for the contained drives. Drive longevity and data security is quite simply the most important design criteria. Most enclosures use a wimpy power supply incapable of maintaining a stable voltage. This lack of stability leads to greatly increased component failures. They also have less than optimum cooling, with either not enough airflow, or if designed as a tiny little shell of a case they must have a jet engine's worth of air going through them to keep the jammed in drives from overheating. The Burly is, from the ground up, task oriented to maintain stable power and stable temperature in the toughest of conditions. And the enclosure itself is solidly built of steel, rugged enough to stand on. Not that I would recommend that, but it surely won't fall apart on you.

No 'planned obsolescence'

  The Burly is as close to infinitely supportable and maintainable as we can make it. It is not intended to be tossed out and replaced every couple of years because it wore out or a newer bus becomes available. Every part inside is user accessible and replaceable. Every component is available as an inexpensive replacement part commonly listed on our Burly Parts page. Long after the warranty is over you can replace a worn out fan or a failed bridge board. We'll help you determine the problem and select the right replacement part.

Versatility

  Every Burly shares the same basic enclosure and most of the internal components. This means that a Firewire Burly can later be converted to an eSATA Burly with a minimum of parts changed out. You don't even have to send it back, we will list the parts for you via email along with install instructions, often a very short list, and you can order up those parts and 'operate' on your Burly yourself with the minimum of downtime, instead of waiting on shipping.

Reliability and Quality Control

  Every Burly, regardless of whether it ships with drives installed or empty of drives, goes through a rigorous test immediately before being packaged up to ship. Every time, every last one, just before being handed off to the shipper, it gets a full set of drives installed and the unit is tested and thoroughly inspected before being lovingly packaged for transit. We take pride in doing everything possible to make sure the product you receive has the best chance of arriving in 'ready to run' condition. We build each of them up, test them, and we ship them out. And we control the process every step of the way up to UPS or FedEx taking it away for delivery to your location.

Custom Configurations

  Have a custom configuration in mind? We welcome the chance to build a Burly to your specifications. We have built eSATA Burlys with a couple of the drives on their own separate Firewire connection. Want mixed drive capacities? No problem. Want a 4 bay with just 2 drives? Piece of cake. How about one bay with a DVD or BluRay burner instead of a hard drive - easy! You name it, we can probably figure out a solution for you at a great price. We just take out the cost of the parts you don't need and add back the cost of the parts substituted. No added 'custom charges' just for swapping a few parts.

Last, but not least: Performance

  Speed -The life blood of a Guru. We are uncompromising on the search for the fastest, which usually means simplest, storage solutions. The main reason we do not sell 'multi port' enclosures, those having Firewire and or USB mixed with eSATA, is that these either have to first bridge the drive through the Firewire bridge and then back through another bridge to the eSATA port - or they must incorporate a switch that is put inline to choose between the buses. This impacts performance greatly in the first bridging example - the drives still have Firewire in the middle of their connection so they are limited to Firewire performance. Or you lose reliability through the use of a switching system. When we find a simple and totally reliable method, that gives us the performance we demand, we will adjust production to match. Until then, we make Firewire/USB Burlys, and we make eSATA Burlys, and hardware RAID Burlys. Each as simple, reliable and wicked fast as we can achieve.

Have Questions on which Burly is for you? Or just to know there is someone at this end available to help you out? Shoot us an email or a call. We'll be glad to talk it over with you.