CRU drive

"CRU drive" is trade shorthand for the DX115 DC carrier made by CRU. According to CRU's digital cinema product guide, nearly 450,000 of its carriers, frames and enclosures have been deployed for duplicating, distributing and ingesting DCPs.

• Carrier. The removable shell that holds the hard drive. It takes a SATA disk of any capacity from any manufacturer.
• Frame. The receiving bay. Server manufacturers fit a DX115 DC frame into a standard 5.25-inch bay, so the carrier slides straight into the cinema server.
• MoveDock. A USB 3.0 adapter. Distributors often ship the carrier and MoveDock together in a protective case, so the drive can be ingested over USB where the server has no frame.
• DCmini. CRU's smaller cartridge for 2.5-inch drives, powered over USB, which also fits DX115 frames with an adapter.

If your server already has a DX115 frame or a CRU rackmount enclosure, CRU says the MoveDock is not needed.

The carrier exists because the alternative was couriering bare drives in bubble wrap. It is a standard shell with a standard connector, it docks into every compliant cinema server, and it survives being posted — mostly.

Electronic delivery has taken over for wide releases, but the carrier has not gone away, and it is not going to. Repertory, archive, festival prints, independent distributors without a delivery contract, and anything from a rights holder who only makes one package a year all still arrive on a disk in a box.

Two habits are worth keeping. Verify on ingest, always — these drives are posted, dropped and reused for years, and failure is not rare. And return them: they are usually loaned, distributors track them, and a cinema with a cupboard of unreturned carriers eventually gets an invoice.