Reviewed by Craig Ball
You’d think getting free stuff is a perk for a technology writer, and occasionally it is. Still, most of what vendors send for review is software, and much of that is — forgive the technical jargon — total crap. Hardware is a welcome change, but testing hardware demands that I buy cards, cables or media the costs of which can outstrip the value of the product under test. Then, if the hardware is something of substantial value, I have to return it to avoid the appearance of impropriety. (LTN has strict guidelines about what writers can, and cannot, keep.) Thus, I made my weekly trek to Fry’s to spend $150 to test a $49.99 (MSRP) device.
I didn’t mind because I’d wondered about USB 3, dubbed "SuperSpeed USB" by marketers. Lately, I’m expending big chunks of uncompensated project time moving data from external USB 2 hard drives to internal disk storage to speed processing.
Processing substantial volumes of ESI housed on external USB 2 drives is painfully slower than performing the same task on data connected by SATA or eSATA. USB 2 is the bottleneck.
SuperSpeed USB 3 promised an exponential jump in speed. The SIIG DP SuperSpeed USB 2-Port PCIe card I bought touted "10X faster" throughput and, in theory, that’s what the USB 3 specification would deliver. But, in theory, I am writing this from my summer home on Mars. In practice, consumer hard drives can only go so fast, but throughput trebled — not too shabby, though no 10X leap. Still, good news: even with the limitations of ordinary SATA hard drives, USB 3 means 3 times faster data transfer speeds.
The Cirago docking station is a solid, graceful device constructed of white plastic, signaling that it aspires to the Apple school of elegant design versus the HP/Dell/Lenovo school of gray/black despair.
For those who’ve come this far still wondering what a hard drive docking station might be, it’s a device to connect a 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA I/II hard drive to a computer via a USB port. Imagine a small toaster, but instead of a slice of bread, you pop in a hard drive.
If you have a USB 3 port on your system — and it’s a good bet you don’t — installation is as easy as plug it in, power it up and drop in a hard drive. Your system will promptly recognize the drive (in the Windows disk management screen, if nowhere else).
If you don’t have a USB 3 port, you can still plug the dock into a USB 2 port (SuperSpeed USB cabling is backward compatible with USB 2) but you will have just an overpriced, not-that-fast USB 2 drive dock that’s ready for USB 3 (if and when 3 sees wide adoption).
You can easily add a USB 3 port to your Windows desktop or laptop for about $30 to $50. I paid $40 for the SIIG 2-port PCIe card, and installation and configuration was no worse than most — which is to say, the installation instructions don’t match what actually happens in terms of screens and menus, and the driver choice is a lucky guess.
But, I ultimately paired the right driver with the card and got it working. Someday soon, Windows 7 will natively support USB 3 devices; but until that time comes, we are back in "supplied driver disk" hell.
To test the Cirago docking station, I dropped in a brand new Hitachi 2 terabyte, 7,200 RPM, 3.5" hard drive. Drive engagement wasn’t flawless as there was too much play in the dock’s slot to assure uniform drive alignment, but ultimately I got the two to mate.
I assigned a drive letter and quick formatted the drive in NTFS (using the usual 512-byte sectors and 8-sector clusters).
I located an unremarkable 110-gigabyte block of data on an internal hard drive comprising 364 files in 20 folders. I copied this to an external hard drive connected via USB 2 and timed the transfer while monitoring average throughput speed. Then, I copied the same 110-gigabyte block to the drive in the docking station via a USB 3 port. I repeated this test twice to confirm the results.
Is this what Consumer’s Union or PC Magazine would do? Heck if I know, but it was enough of a real world test for me to determine if my life would become the "Transfers up to 5 Gbps" Shangri-La promised on the Cirago box.
"Up to" is one of those wonderful marketing phrases. My Prius can achieve speeds of "up to" 150 mph, but only while falling into a very deep ravine. If my math is right, 5 gigabits per second is 625 megabytes per second. More than half a gigabyte per second?
Boy howdy, could I love that — my 110-gigabyte transfer would be finished in less than three minutes! Barely time enough to grab a cup of coffee.
Alas, SuperSpeed must not gain sufficient power from our yellow sun because it took about 23 minutes to transfer the data via USB 3, with an average throughput settling in at 83.5 megabytes per second. By comparison, pokey USB 2 completed the 110-gigabyte transfer in about 70 minutes, averaging about 28.5 megabytes per second.
So, did I get 10X performance at "up to 5 gigabits per second"? Not even close But, I completed the transfer using USB 3 in a third of the time it took using conventional USB 2 and the transfer speed approached the max throughput of the hard drive. I can’t ask for more than that.
It’s enough of a leap to easily justify the investment in a SuperSpeed card and docking station for anyone who has to routinely move data from hard drives and lacks a fast eSata port to do so.
Bottom line: If you can get the source drive on a computer’s internal bus, you’ll move data fastest; but if you’re looking for a convenient external bus connection, USB 3 and a device like the Cirago CDD2000 USB 3 Hard Drive Docking Station are worth your time and your dime.
RenewData Anagram Keyword Development
Reviewed by Sean Doherty
But keyword search remains the only game in town when it comes to finding content relevant to an inquiry. After all, how do you describe a concept?
One thing is clear in the aftermath of the attacks: keyword searching has to improve. Toward that end, RenewData launched a new service at LegalTech West Coast: Anagram Keyword Development.
Keyword searching a repository of content can result in data sets that are underinclusive (missing relevant documents) or overbroad (including irrelevant documents).
To improve the search, stakeholders must manually review the result sets, or samples of the sets, and refine the search criteria to return a manageable set of documents to review. This process can work on discreet content repositories in an academic or technical setting. In the context of litigation, the process can be long, tedious, and overly contentious. One party may want to search for green eggs, another may want to search for ham in all the available electronically stored information.
The software was designed to reduce the risks that keyword searches may miss something important, as well as to improve results. It is a combination of search software and business processes that aims to provide RenewData customers with a list of keywords and keyword phrases gleaned from a content repository by the legal concepts and factual context of litigation. From that list, legal professionals can choose the keywords or keyword phrases to conduct a proper inquiry.
The system relies on a process that displays the entire vocabulary of a document collection, expands and enhances that vocabulary with synonyms, organize it, and presents it to a legal professional so he or she can choose the keywords to accomplish an e-discovery request. In effect, Anagram Keyword is a four-stepmechanical process that RenewData says can be repeated with similar results, i.e., that is defensible in light of judicial inquiry.
The four steps in the process include:
1. Analyze a case and develop logical expressions to search for relevant information.
2. Extract and analyze language from a content repository.
3. Develop synonyms, called "Synonym Rings," from the logical expressions developed in step 1, based on the analysis of the content repository in step 2.
4. Use the Synonym Rings to fashion Boolean queries to find relevant documents.
What’s new?
• Step 1 is a big, familiar step, but RenewData lends consultants to accomplish it.
• Step 2 everyone and their brother would like to do for you.
• Synonym Rings in step 3 sounds new, which adds to the keyword possibilities.
• Step 4 returns to Boolean searching.
What is really new? Anagram Keyword is a process to develop the keywords of inquiry. Arguably, that process is defensible when the judge asks you how you came up with those keywords.
Reviewed by Sean Doherty
At LegalTech West Coast, Florida-based FTI Technology introduced the latest upgrade of its Ringtail Analytics module for its Ringtail electronic data discovery software. The module retains the clustering and visual review capabilities of Document Mapper, and has added two new components: Smart Decision and Concept Mapper — both designed to assist in early case assessment, keyword testing, and creating review assignments quickly and efficiently.
Although many vendors were ushering in concept searching as the new keyword search, FTI and RenewData say "long live keywords."
FTI’s Smart Decision aims to quickly identify key documents and custodians associated with a set of keywords or metadata. The software analyzes data contained in an OLAP cube and lets users zero in on important content using "pivot" tables developed from the cube. But FTI does not limit its analytics to keywords alone.
FTI’s Concept Mapper software groups documents containing similar concepts into clusters. Using OLAP technology, Concept Mapper can assess 20K to 1M documents and group them by important nouns and noun phrases, and place the results in up to 99 related clusters for immediate review.
A dashboard view of clusters helps users identify relevant documents for review. Users can easily confirm the identification of irrelevant clusters and check exceptional cases.
If you haven’t followed FTI, but your firm or clients are pursuing SharePoint to gather content and make it available to customers, check out FTI’s SharePoint Harvester software. It helps users collect and preserve SharePoint sites by custodian. There are software packages on the market that archive SharePoint sites, but archiving data by custodian is arguably a defensible approach to e-discovery and compliance.
WiebeTech USB WriteBlocker
Reviewed by Craig Ball
I’ve lost count of how often I’ve brayed, "Lawyers have lost touch with the evidence." We’ve lost our ability to dive right into the data when a new client comes in — at least if the client brings a hard drive or thumb drive.
No lawyer with half a brain plugs electronic evidence into his or her own computer and pokes around because, by now, most lawyers know about metadata, and appreciate that they can alter evidence simply by browsing it.
Can you say "spoliation"? I knew you could.
But the alternative is also pretty ugly — lawyers treating electronic evidence like it’s radioactive. It’s sent out to expensive vendors and experts while the lawyers wait days or weeks to see what’s there.
Wouldn’t it be great if lawyers lacking technical prowess could quickly and safely wade into the client’s digital files and see what’s what?
Computer forensic examiners dodge the spoliation bullet by employing tools and techniques called "write protection" that intercept changes to electronic media. Write protectors a.k.a. "write blockers" can be either hardware devices or software applications.
Hardware write blockers provide tangible, visual assurance that data is well protected against its greatest enemy, which is not heat, electrostatic discharge or shock, but human error.
Having a hardware write blocker at hand enables a lawyer to start looking at the electronic evidence immediately and start asking the right questions, all without fear of inadvertent spoliation.
I’ve hesitated to advocate that litigators need write blockers because, simple as they are, most hardware write blockers are still too complicated for lawyers.
Too, they’ve long been pricey gadgets and, until lately, you needed one for IDE hard drives (with adapters for notebook drives) and another for SATA drives, along with power supplies and cables and such.
But strolling the aisles of a recent computer forensics confab, I happened across a nifty little hardware write blocker that any Luddite lawyer can use. The WiebeTech USB WriteBlocker, from Kansas-based WiebeTech, is a dead-simple gadget that looks like a thumb drive on steroids.
First, you plug the device to be write blocked into the USB port of the Wiebetech USB WriteBlocker, then you plug the Wiebetech WriteBlocker into the USB port of the computer you’ll use to peruse the evidence.
The computer sees the contents of the evidence just as if you’d plugged it in sans write blocker, but all changes to the evidence are intercepted.
Do you need to examine a thumb drive or external hard drive without stomping on the evidence? With this self-powered, plug-and-play device, it’s a cinch. "But, wait!" you say, "what about the hard drives inside desktops and laptops? They don’t use USB connections!" Indeed, they don’t; but a few bucks buys a cable and power supply that allow you to connect laptop and desktop IDE and SATA drives to a USB port. With cheap, easy USB connectivity, you’re back in business with the USB WriteBlocker.
I tested the device thoroughly to satisfy myself that it performed as promised. I hashed various thumb drives, an external hard drive and both a SATA and IDE internal drive before connection, then tried to write to them in various ways. Hashing them again, I found no alterations at all. Every write effort was duly intercepted.
At $200, it’s not something for every lawyer’s keychain; but for law firm and corporate IT staff, and particularly for those conducting deskside interviews of custodians in e-discovery, it’s a great gadget.
It’s also handy for checking out drives of departed employees to see if there’s evidence of deletion, data theft or other abuse. You improve your odds in court in these cases if you haven’t corrupted the metadata.
Finally, the Wiebetech USB WriteBlocker comes with a software program that interrogates devices to glean their serial numbers. That’s a useful e-discovery feature as it can be challenging to differentiate one thumb drive from another, especially when everyone went to the conference where they handed out identical thumb drives.
I’d like to see it at a lower price point, particularly as there are free — though less desirable — software alternatives, but even one case today can easily justify the cost of this handy, well-engineered device.
