Verbatim has announced a new solid-state drive designed specifically for long-term storage. The external SSD doesn’t allow data deletion or overwriting, turning it into a write-one drive for archiving purposes. The external SSD is among the company’s WOV Series. It packs 128GB of NAND flash and connects to your PC via USB 3.2 Gen 1. Verbatim is pitching it as a write-protected SSD, meaning you can only read from it under normal conditions. For a similar solution, you may want to use Veeam Backup and Replication with the immutability feature which prohibits deletion of data from the extent of the scale-out backup repository by making that data temporarily immutable. It is done for increased security: Immutability protects your data from loss as a result of attacks, malware activity, or any other injurious actions. Here are some related Veeam guides: Fix critical Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5, 10, and 11 vulnerabilities, Veeam Certified Architect: A review of the VMCA Training & Certification, and how to setup Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure [Part 1].
SMOVA128G is portable, prevents accidental overwrites or deletes, and has a 10-year warranty. Also, here is a guide on Standalone Veeam ONE installation: How to set up Veeam ONE 11 Server.To write to the drive, you must first install a dedicated piece of software that is only compatible with Windows 10 or Windows 11. The drive does work with Windows, Mac, and Chromebook, but is limited to read-only mode. The idea is to protect mission-critical files from being accidentally deleted or overwritten.
The SWOVA128G read and write speeds are rated at 540 MB/s and 180 MB/s, respectively. You’ll have to take Verbatim’s word for this as the drive will error out when attempting to run a benchmark program.
Speaking of the device’s durability and reliability, it is backed by a 10-year hardware warranty in which Verbatim will replace a bad drive during this period. Notably, the warranty does not guarantee stored data so you’ll likely want a secondary backup as a fail-safe. What’s more, Verbatim says data cannot be erased and the only way to effectively do so is to physically destroy the SSD.
Verbatim hasn’t given the price of SWOVA128G or when it would be released, however, it looks like Japan would experience the usage of the device before any other part of the world.