RDX (disk)

RDX cartridges are shock-proof 2.5-inch Serial ATA hard disk drives and are advertised to sustain a 1 meter (39 in) drop onto a concrete floor and to offer an archival lifetime up to 30 years and transfer up to 650GB/hr.

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.

Both technologies allow an ordinary user to remove and replace the cartridge containing the recording medium without special training.

However REV places the read/write heads in the drive instead of inside the cartridge, which means that the drive's loading/unloading mechanism must mechanically insert heads into and remove them from the cartridge through a physical hole.

[2] By eliminating the need for this, RDX turns the drive into a dock—whose loading mechanism simply establishes an electronic connection to the cartridge.