CRU drive

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.