Features

• Support HDD up to 100GB
• Microsoft Windows 98SE/ ME/ 2000/XP & Mac OS 9.0+ systems
• USB 1.1, 2.0 and Firewire host ports
• Bus power (power consumption under 5V/1A): Take the power from the host
  PC extra USB port, no external power necessary
• Allows device hot-swapping(Plug and Play)

On the back of this hard drive you will find support for USB and Firewire connections. This will allow just about any computer with those connections to use this drive. Keep in mind that this drive gets its power from the USB and Firewire connections. This means that if your computer does not put out enough power to the ports then you may need an external power supply. For example, this hard drive needs 5W of power to run. Since USB only provides 2.5W per port the USB cable has two ends to plug into a computer so that it can draw power from two USB ports. I have found that some older computers and USB 1.1 do not provide the full 2.5W to the USB ports, so you would need an external power supply to make up the difference. One other thing I noticed is that some Macs output more than the standard 2.5W per USB port. In fact they put enough power into each port that you only need one USB cable to power the device. Firewire by default supplies 12W per port so one port is plenty.

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Also on the back of the device is a small light that indicates the read/write activity.

Design

Design is not a huge factor for portable hard drives. Most people are more concerned about performance and size. The only aspect of design that does matter is the physical size of the drive. Since this drive uses 2.5″ hard drive you will certainly get a small form factor.

The device has very small dimensions. With a size of 80 x 15 x143 mm you can easily fit this in your pocket.

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The drive also has a carrying case. This case has a spot for the drive, cable and a little pocket for business cards or something like that. This is nice for keeping everything together and making it easy to carry. There are also several elastic bands that keep everything from falling out.

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Because the device uses standard size drives you can probably replace the one you have with a bigger one later when they come out. As you can see this is simply a controller board with the drive plugged directly into it. You can easily remove the drive from the board and put a new one on. The small piece of foam on the top keeps the drive from moving around in the extra space. As you can also tell the device is using Segate hard drives.

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Performance

Performance is definitely one of the most important features of an external hard drive. You certainly don’t want to wait forever while a slow drive copies and moves your data back and forth.

With support USB 2.0 and Firewire you can certainly expect to get the fastest speeds available. Keep in mind that you will never get the full benefit of the hard drives speed because both Firewire and USB 2.0 have a maximum speed that is well below the maximum speed of hard drives. The maximum speed for USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps (60 MBps). The maximum speed for Firewire is 400 Mbps (50 MBps).

These external hard drives use Seagate 2.5″ hard drives. These hard drives use many of the latest technological advancements that improve speed and low operation noise. These advancements include Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) Motor Drive, ATA-6 Interface, 12ms Average Seek Time, 100 MB/sec Transfer Rate and 8MB Buffer. This hard drive also has a rating of 300,000 MTTF Hours.

I ran some quick benchmarks using SiSoftware Sandra. Before I ran the tests I defraged the drive to make sure I received the best speed possible. These are the results:

Conclusion

External hard drives are always more expensive than the equivalent internal hard drive. This is because of all the extra hardware that is required to interface and power the hard drive. I found on amazon.com that you can get the 80 GB version of this drive for $164.99 if you wanted to buy the hard drive by itself the lowest price I found was $131. So in reality you are only paying about $30 for all the hardware. This is really a good deal. Add to that a really great 3 year warranty and you have yourself a great deal. I can highly recommend this drive to anyone looking for a portable mass storage device.