Review If the name of this hard drive isn’t explicit enough, one look at it will tell you exactly who it’s aimed at. The brushed aluminium surround and smoky black top mean that it looks right at home sitting beneath an iMac or Applecinema Display.
Iomega’s Mac Companion: storage plus USB hub
Iomega’s attempt to woo style-conscious users of Apple kit goes further than fluttering its eyelashes and showing a bit of leg, however. The 2TB or 3TB drive, depending on which version you choose, is formatted as HFS+, for out-of-the-box compatibility with Mac OS X. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Toshiba is the first manufacturer to deliver a 2.5in laptop hard drive that packs more than 500GB of storage. Its new MK6465GSX sports 640GB on two platters, and while we are aware that the Western Digital Scorpio Blue and Seagate Momentus 5400.7 are also available in 640GB models we haven’t seen either drive to date.
Toshiba’s MK646GSX: storage boost for your notebook?
The Toshiba is, clearly, built around a 320GB platter and comes in five versions. The 640GB and 500GB models use two platters and four heads, although our maths suggests that the 500GB might use two platters and three heads. The 320GB and 250GB versions have a single platter and two heads, and the baby 160GB drive brings up the rear with a single platter and single head.
All five drives have the same physical form-factor and measure 9.5mm in thickness. They also share a 5400rpm spin speed, 8MB of cache and a 3Gb/s Sata interface that is compliant with the Sata 2.6 standard.
It’s interesting to note that the single-platter models have an idle acoustic figure of 19dB and a seek figure of 20dB while the dual platter drives emit 25dB at idle and also while they are working for their living. While we were testing the 640GB drive, we were indeed impressed that the drive was very quiet. Realistically, though, that’s true of most laptop drives. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Freecom appears to be taking a leap out of LaCie’s book. Once known for cheap but plain looking storage products, Freecom has been bitten by the design bug.
Freecom’s XS: do hard drives really need clothing-style labels?
Take the XS, claimed by its maker to be the world’s smallest external 3.5in hard drive. This boy is clad entirely in skintight black rubber with gaps only to expose the power socket, a mini USB port and a sticker that says how capacious the drive is.
And you know those small labels on Levi’s jeans, the ones sewn into the seams that tell you who ran up your trousers, should you have forgotten? Yes, the XS has one of those.
The matte-black rubbery coating isn’t totally sealed. The far end from the ports is moulded like a lid, suggesting you can flip it up and slide out the drive squeezed within. Not so. It’s actually glued down, and while you could pull it up in order to swap out the HDD, you’ll almost certainly tear the rubber, which, though thick around the sides of the drive is thin where it covers the front and back. Read the rest of this entry »
Review LaCie has long prided itself on taking a somewhat more idiosyncratic approach to hard drive styling than its rival manufacturers do.
LaCie’s Starck: not so much Iron Man, more aluminium, man
As the business has been gradually taken over by the companies that make the drives themselves – Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and so on, all of whom have lower manufacturing costs than the likes of LaCie, the French company has dared to be different in order to differentiate.
Who can forget its bullion-style Golden Disk, the Lego-esque Brick, or the oddly named Skwarim, a small, pink square of a drive?
LaCie’s obsession with design continues with its latest offering, a portable drive styled by none other than Philippe Starck, he of 1950s-space-rocket-style lemon squeezer fame. Whether the man himself sketched out the LaCie Starck’s contours and curves, leaving the filling in work to junior members of his studio a la Rembrandt, or did the lot himself, we can’t say. Either way, this is not your everyday drive enclosure. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The 2TB Caviar Black is the second hard drive we have seen with a capacity of two terabytes. Glance back to our 2008 round-up of 1TB drives, which used three or four platters, and you can see that this is pretty much a doubling of areal density.
Western Digital’s Caviar Black 2TB: covered up…
The first 2TB drive we saw was a member of WD’s Caviar Green line-up with an emphasis on environmentally friendly performance. The key here is power draw so the Green drive uses a lowly spin speed of 5400rpm despite the inevitable performance hit.
It’s a different story with the 2TB Caviar Black which has a spin speed of 7200rpm along with a host of other features.
The guts of the Black are similar to the 2TB Green as both models use four 500GB platters with eight read/write heads. However, the extra spin speed has made some changes necessary. For starters, the cache has doubled in size to 64MB. Every drive in the Caviar Black family is described as having “up to 64MB”, but to date the only drive we have seen with that much memory is the 2TB – smaller drives have 32MB. Read the rest of this entry »
