So this week-end, I started to play with ROC-RK3328-CC (Renegade) board that I received from T-Chip / Firefly-Team and as always, I used Etcher to flash the firmware images to micro SD cards. Once flashing is complete, you’ll get a screen mentioning Etcher Pro, a standalone hardware solution allowing to duplicate the content of one micro SD card to 16 other cards.
That’s very interesting if you need to duplicate many cards for a project, but the only problem is that the device is not available just yet. So I thought such equipment must already exist and indeed, a company called SySTOR offers such systems able to duplicate one (micro) SD card to up to 199 other (micro) SD cards.
Some of the specifications & key features of the system:
- Processor – Multi-core processor
- System Memory – 256 MB DDR3
- Capacity – Various models from 4 to 200 micro SD card / SD card slots allowing the duplication of one SD card to many.
- Display – Real-time display on LCD screen
- Features
- Copy
- Up to 2GB/min(33MB/s)
- Synchronous and Asynchronous copy modes
- Option to copy systems and files data only or the whole media
- Erase – Quick and full erase function that conforms on the DoD data security standards
- Format – 3 modes: Auto, FAT, and FAT32
- Copy
- Misc – Status LED; UP, DOWN, OK, ESC button
- Power Supply – 115V/230V
- Certification – CE, FCC, RoHS
It seems straightforward to use, and the system can easily be purchased on Amazon. However, the price for such equipment is not exactly cheap with the barely useful 1 to 3 SD card duplicator already costing $495, while the 1-to-7 model going for $540, and the massive 1-to-199 SD duplicator shown at the top could be yours for $20,995.00 *only*. It should be worth the money for businesses since it will save many man-hours.
Etcher Pro promises to be faster and less expensive than a traditional Disk Duplicator and boast more features. For reference SySTOR 1-to-15 model sells for $1,190.00, so hopefully Etcher Pro will be significantly cheaper once it comes out.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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microSD cards are now available in a variety of different formats — SDSC, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC.
Which formats do these SysSTOR duplicators support?
There is not much point in shelling out $20,FAT, and FAT32995.00 for ease of duplicating a microSD card with a complete collection of gigabytes of kitty videos for thousands of Facebook friends, if the thing cannot cope with 200 GByte or more (eg 128 TB on the way) capacity cards.
The specifications of 256 MByte DDR3 and only a choice of FAT or FAT32 file systems seems very limiting.
Not sure about the different SD card formats. But I understand it can do “raw copy” too, so if the source SD card is formatted with EXT-4 or has multiple partitions for example, it does not matter, it can just do a full data dump to the other cards. If you check Amazon reviews, people have used the duplicator with micro SD card for Raspberry Pi.
Thanks for the additional information.
” it can just do a full data dump to the other cards”
Well that sounds like it does offer more possibilities. I would still worry about compatibility with the newer format of SDUC and would not be surprised if that was not supported.