Thursday, May 19, 2005

Room to expand

Try #2 to write this post: (Much shorter version)

I just bought a SimpleTech 250GB USB2.0/FireWire HD. The specs are as follows:

1 Firewire 1394a port
1 USB2.0 Hi-Speed port
The enclosure itself is a prolific chipset. The internal HD turned out to be a Seagate 250GB
HD with 7200rpm spindle speed and 8MB cache.

The drive as it arrived from UPS (it arrived early in the morning the day after it shipped, but with no tracking number).



The box of the drive itself



The drive itself as packed in the box. The drive was packed pretty well, but I would liked a bit more padding.
The drive is made of metal, which hopefully will help disappate heat. It comes with drive stands and was designed to be upright, but without the feet it's possible to run it horizontally.



The drive came with 2 VERY short USB2.0 and Firewire cables. They are the shortest I've ever seen.



The firewire cord is only about 1 foot long. Which means the drive has to be right next to the laptop, if it has any chance of reaching.



The pictures were taken with my roommates' Sony digicam, as my Nikon is still broken.

So far I've formatted the drive, and have backed up my laptop's internal HD to it. It has about 50GBs of data on the drive currently. I have even been able to test whether the drive boots, good news, it does. I've also run a surface scan using Tech Tool pro, and the drive passed.

The drive itself is quiet, the only noise you can hear is the seek noises. Once in a while, theres' this thrashing sound that's quite a bit louder than normal, but I think it's normal. Hopefully it keeps working well.