Preface

Some companies and schools use recovery cards. A recovery card is used to undo changes applied to a hard disks. The greatest difference between a recovery card and protection software is, that the actual protection software is located on a card (instead of being located on the hard drive).

Some recovery card manufacturers assert that protection software is not secure. We can't follow that assertion. That's why we discuss the differences between hardware and software hard disk protection in this document. Before we start we'd like to state there is no noteworthy difference in security. Both solutions - no matter if hardware or software - protect PCs absolutely reliable.

Security

Security is the main feature of both hardware and software hard disk protections, and both are secure solutions. Prerequisite for fulfilling this job is to protect the computer's BIOS so nobody can boot from an insecure disk. Whilst hardware solutions are able to protect the BIOS themselves, recovery software requires the administrator to set a password for the BIOS manually. No matter if via password protection or hardware BIOS protection, security is very high for both approaches.

Flexibility

Large PC networks never stand still. New PCs are attached, old PC get reused for new applications or get removed. And the software of all PCs changes even faster than the network. New software is installed permanently and present software has to be updated frequently. For a recovery card it's a hard job to stay up to date here. Sooner or later the hardware will be outdated and won't fit in the computers. The result is permanent rising affort and update costs.

Regarding flexibility a software has greate advantage. For disk protection software that means: Cheap (often free) updates to latest versions and software fixes. On the other hand comfortable installation without ever touching a screw driver. Products like HDGUARD furthermore perfectly fit into cloning and ghosting scenarios. HDGUARD provides an installation wizard program to nearly completely configure the software on its own. As long a hardware doesn't come with it's own wizard putting the card into a PC and close the case, no card will beat a software solution ever.

Price

Software hard disk protection in price is much better than recovery cards. Especially the amount of work is much higher since every card has to be build in and most of them require local configuration and set-up. Both manufacturers of recovery cards and software protection provide attractive price scales to lower the costs for larger networks. A software usually is available at the half price of a disk recovery card.

Comparison

Conclusion

Whilst recovery cards have no real advantage in security, the costs show that using a disk protection software is always a good idea. Remember: Security is not relative. Experience values^*) of many years confirm the high security a software solution offers. However, in the end it's a question of preference, budget and comfort if you favor software over hardware.

 

*) Experience values are based on over 200.000 HDGUARD protected computers all over the world.