External Hard Drives
Posts: 2462
  • Posted On: Nov 22 2006 4:18am
Update, for those who are interested:

The unit arrived today. Shipping was fast - I imagine if you order early you could probably get next-day delivery. UPS doesn't work weekends, though, so take that into consideration. Shipping charges was reasonable, although I'm also a little disappointed they were extra at this price point. Lots of online stores would be offering free shipping. Even so, TigerDirect seems to be a really solid merchant and I have no problem recommending them for online purchases. A+.

The unit itself: I don't have a screwdriver in res, but even so the unit was no trouble to put together. Took all of about ten minutes to pull apart the case, plug in some cables, and get it all back together. Looks fantastic, very sleek and whatnot. The enclosure also has two Firewire ports, if you wanted to connect several drives in sequence. Some of the reviews cited a loud fan, some a quiet one: I seem to have got one with a relatively quiet fan

Data transfer is pretty quick over Firewire, about 25 minutes to transfer ~10 GB, which seems reasonable. It's fast enough to play my music and video right off the external, even fast enough to play Warcraft III off. Haven't tried playing Unreal Tournament from it, yet.

Straight plug and play application for Mac - plug it in, run Disc Utility to format it for OSX, and you're done.

So far I've got about 70GB used - actual formatted capacity is ~235GB.

All in all, great unit, great price, great service. If you're looking for a mass-storage solution, look no further.
Posts: 179
  • Posted On: Nov 23 2006 3:52pm
You can buy a HD enclosure and slap whatever you want inside instead of mucking about in the future.
Posts: 23
  • Posted On: Nov 23 2006 4:07pm
heh, I just use an older unused tower connected by USB....
Posts: 2788
  • Posted On: Nov 23 2006 5:36pm
LOL... little late, Morgan... we already covered that, and he actually already bought an external enclosure and HD.
Posts: 179
  • Posted On: Nov 23 2006 6:27pm
<-- should reread threads before posting. Good call! Also, smart on Firewire since you probably don't have eSATA