What are the recommendations for brand or type of hardware write blocker?

Question

Write blockers are used by digital preservation practitioners to ensure the integrity of digital content on a hard drive, by ensuring that nothing is written to the drive accidentally as part of processing (for example, to process hard drives received as part of a manuscript collection).

Answer 1

For the last few years we have been using a Tableau SATA/IDE/SAS/USB/FireWire Forensic Bridge that is internally mounting into a 5.25 inch half height drive bay on an acquisition computer in our forensics lab.

For floppy disks, we have been a Kryoflux on two different acquisition computers in our forensics lab. Kryoflux is hardware plus software.

In addition, we have had a Digital Intelligence UltraKit portable kit (crazy bright yellow) which contains a number of different hardware write blockers and adapters and connectors for use with all sorts of hard drives or storage devices.

Comments

I also asked about this a couple of months ago, via twitter, and also more directly of the forensic IT team at the accountancy firm where my wife works.  Tableau was the universal recommendation.  The forensic bridges can be seen at http://www.guidancesoftware.com/products/Pages/tableau/products/forensic-bridges.aspx (the UK distributor appears to be http://www.dataduplication.co.uk/details/Tableau.html)

Answer 2

I've found that forensicswiki.org is a great site just for finding out what's available:  http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Write_Blockers.