MAIN HEAD Storcase develops rugged shipboard storage solution http://www.storcase.com UK company Storcase has developed a system for housing a computer hard drive. The system gives a hard drive additional protection and also makes it easy to move the hard drive from computer to computer. It justs around GBP 300. While it might not sound particularly exciting the possibilities for shipping are quite high. Firstly, the hard drive of the computer onboard is protected from vibration, power surging and heat exposure. Secondly it is possible to install software on a computer on land and then simply move the hard drive across and plug it into the shipboard computer, avoiding all the complex expense of installing and maintaining software whilst onboard the ship itself. Thirdly, the ship computer could even have a complete spare hard drive onboard. If anything happens to the main computer hard drive, for example being corrupted by a virus, or broken, the seafarers just unplug the hard drive and install a completely fresh one and then the computer starts working as new. Computer hard drives do take a bit of a bashing. The disk inside them spins at typically 14,000 revolutions a minute, compared to 1,400 revolutions a minute for the average washing machine. And they do break every now and again, which is very expensive to fix, particularly if they have valuable data on them. The Storcase system was not developed specifically for shipping; it has already been used in several other demanding environments, including in space, in hospitals and in military applications. DESAS discrete surveillance and alerting system normal purplefinder functionality 2 way polling capability in the event of a panic