Closer Look

This HDD series has a most appropriate name: the drive we’ve got for our tests looks like a thick book indeed. Its case is made of thick silvery plastic. There are a lot of vent holes in the side panels, except for the “binding edge”, that are to ensure proper thermal conditions for the HDD. You can position the device both vertically or horizontally for work. It takes less space when placed upright. There’s a band of a rubber-like plastic going along the perimeter of this “book” so that it stood firm on any surface. The Power button is inserted into two LED rings on the “binding edge”: the external ring indicates power and disk activity and the other shows how much data the drive currently stores. On the opposite side of the case there are two FireWire 800, one FireWire 400 and one USB 2.0 port, a power connector, and a Kensington lock hole.

The case contains a 3.5” hard disk drive with a storage capacity of 500GB. Its spindle rotation speed is 7200rpm and its cache buffer is 16MB large. The average seek time is 8.9 milliseconds. The drive supports three interfaces (FireWire 800 and 400, and USB 2.0), Automatic Power On and Safe Power Off features. The drive is operable within an ambient temperature range of 5° to 35°C. Its dimensions are 172.2 x 143 x 56.7mm. Its weight is 1.2kg.

The following is included with the drive: an external power adapter with cable, FireWire 800 cable, FireWire 400 cable, USB 2.0 cable, Quick Installation Guide, and a CD with the automatic backup utility EMC Retrospect Express.

The average retail price of the drive is $350.

Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used to explore the operating properties of the external hard drive:

• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0
• IOMeter 2003.02.15

Testbed configuration:

• Mainboards: Albatron PX865PE Pro and ASUS P5WD2G5-Pro (for FireWire 800)
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 hard disk drive, 15GB
• Radeon 7000 graphics card
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2

The external drive was connected to a mainboard’s USB 2.0 port during the test. The FireWire 400 interface was provided by the VIA VT6307 chip installed on the mainboard.

The drive’s results will be compared with those of products with a similar storage capacity. We took a Seagate Pushbutton Backup ST3750640CB-RK and a Maxtor OneTouch III FireWire 400/USB 2.0 F01G500 (the detailed review of Seagate's solution will follow shortly). These two drives do not support FireWire 800.