Maximum PC Backup Drives RSS Feed

Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4

David Murphy — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:50:00 -0500

Buffalo’s 500GB DriveStation Combo 4 external drive is the fastest USB drive we’ve ever tested, and it even holds its own on an eSATA connection. That’s thanks to a propriety technology called TurboUSB that squeaks additional speeds out of the device. On Windows XP, a DriveStation connected with TurboUSB improved its synthetic read and write speeds by 20 percent (even though its burst speeds confused our benchmark) over a typical USB connection. The device’s real-world speeds weren’t as dramatic—a mere four percent increase—but it was an improvement nonetheless.

We didn’t see any real-world performance improvement between the two modes in Windows Vista because TurboUSB is built into the operating system itself. We’d definitely use this device on XP, but it’s a wash with Vista.

The DriveStation comes with Memeo AutoBackup software and a full-disk security utility that conceals your drive under 128- or 256-bit AES encryption. The latter program’s lock and unlock shortcuts for the encryption mechanism are mislabeled, but we were more bothered that it accepted our password via USB but rejected it over eSATA.

Minus these quirks, the DriveStation is a fine external storage product. It’s not blazing a speed trail on its eSATA connection, but it stuffs the USB pipe.

Antec Veris

David Murphy — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:47:52 -0500

Addressing different designs for external storage enclosures is a lot like taking a microscope to Pop Tarts and counting the sprinkles to determine which pastry variety contains maximum tastiness. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. Because there’s not anything functionally different with Antec’s Veris enclosure than any of the many, many other enclosures we’ve tested. You slap a drive in, connect a USB or eSATA cord, and call it a day.

Well, sort of. While the crux of the device is simple and problem-free, the Veris still makes for a little bit of a different experience. For starters, the drive enclosure comes with a single screw that must be removed before you can shove a drive into the box. It’s a minor annoyance, given that other enclosures we’ve seen—we’re looking at you, Icy Dock—are one-hundred-percent screw-free. But unlike the Icy Dock enclosure, the Veris comes with a silent fan on the bottom of the device that churns a constant, albeit low amount of air over your hard drive.

Speed-wise, the Veris does nothing to hinder or boost the performance of your drives in any capacity. The USB and eSATA connections are as easy to access as the device’s power switch. Given its relative silence when placed near a churning computer, the downward-facing light on the front of the Veris is a little poor at telling you whether the enclosure is on or not. We would have much preferred a simple, outward-facing LED.

The minutia of our criticism should suggest exactly how we feel about this device. While it’s a little boxy and ugly, it’s still a solid addition to both your desk and desktop PC. The Veris is not the best device for those who plan on switching through a ton of drives, but it’s a great mate for a single drive. The enclosed gentle, breezy fan ensures drive reliability, while the device’s near-silent operation ensures user sanity. It’s a win all around!

Thermaltake BlacX

David Murphy — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:00:40 -0600

What?!

There’s really no better way to summarize our thoughts about Thermaltake’s newest, well—we’ll call it an enclosure, for comparison’s sake. In actuality, the BlacX is more the spaceport docking bay to your Millennium Falcon of a hard drive. Your storage apparatus of choice sits half-submerged in the BlacX itself, its tail pointed to the heavens. The drive remains “enclosed” by nothing more than the molecules of oxygen hovering around its bare exterior. It’s a little perilous of a situation and definitely a little goofy. But yet, it works!

Speed-freaks that we are here at Maximum PC, we found ourselves enjoying the absurd amounts of time we saved by using the BlacX over other storage enclosures. It’s a simple equation: placing a drive into the BlacX mounting apparatus takes one second at best, three if you’re clumsy. Every other enclosure we’ve seen requires some sort of physical disassembly of the chassis, a careful insertion and alignment of the hard drive with the obligatory SATA connectors, possibly a mounting screw (or four), and final reassembly. It’s a lot to type, even more to do if you plan on swapping hard drives on a semi-frequent basis.

Since the BlacX supports both 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives, it eliminates the need to carry two different enclosures around. You don’t even need a special adapter to make use of this awesome hybrid-ness. The adaptation is built right into the BlacX’s mounting mechanism. When we stress that the BlacX is as easy to operate as it is to face a drive downwards and set it on a stand, we mean every single word. For handiness, the BlacX gets a 10-Kick Ass.

That said, we’re still nervous when we see our expensive, data-filled hard drive just sticking into the free air like a duck’s butt when it bobs for food. We also worry about our increased chance of bumping, jostling, or otherwise touching the drive and damaging its contents—the very things protected against by an enclosure that, you know, covers the drive in some capacity.

After swapping quite a few drives in and out to test the BlacX’s connection—it doesn’t limit speeds in the slightest, to note—we realized that this is a risk we’ll just have to accept. Popping and remounting the drives is just too handy a process with the BlacX. It’s perfect for use in both our Lab and home “nerd rooms,” minus two little caveats: you’ll have to store your bare hard drives somewhere (in an enclosure, perhaps?), and you’ll be stuck with the device’s USB connection. A little eSATA would sure sweeten our hearts; our verdict, too.

Enermax Jazz

David Murphy — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:13:08 -0600

For a device called the Jazz, Enermax’s newest USB and eSATA external 3.5” hard drive enclosure isn’t much of an improvisation in the ho-hum world of storage containers. In fact, we can only think of one major differences that set this device apart from most every other enclosure we’ve tested: you can see through it.

The non-descript enclosure eschews fancy lights and colors, opting instead for an all-black mesh grill wraparound. It’s an interesting look with a hidden agenda. The holey exterior does double duty--it looks great, and it lets air move around the drive without requiring a noisy fan. But what you gain in aesthetics (and air circulation), you lose in anxiety: spill anything near this guy and you’re screwed. We can’t help but think that this open container, as it were, is also a prime magnet for dust, dirt, and debris – any number of things we wouldn’t want near our shiny new hard drive.

We’ll give Enermax the benefit of the doubt for trying to do something fresh and unique. For all the design-work, we were surprised to find that the Jazz enclosure is rather simplistic when it comes to actually installing your drive. Mounting the drive is as easy as sliding the top of the Jazz backwards a little bit, popping it off, slapping a drive in (making sure it aligns with little retention pegs), and attaching the driveto the combined SATA power and data connector. Easy as pie.

We had a wee bit of trouble getting the top of the enclosure to actually slide back over the drive. As it turns out, we didn't fit the drive squarely on said lower retention pegs. We made this minor adjustment and were met with success: the enclosure closed perfectly. We flicked the locking mechanism with our thumb, set the enclosure in the provided stand, and flipped the little guy on for benchmark testing. All in all, you could hold your breath and change the drive, secure in the fact that you'd be able to complete your task well before you pass out. It's that easy.

Speed-wise, the Jazz enclosure does nothing to boost or hinder drive performance at all. It's the same speed as the same drive in an internal configuration. It’s an unsurprising note, given that all straight-up enclosures we test tend to perform the same way. For the most part, the big band of external enclosures is all about looks, connections, and installations. And the Jazz hits every note of its solid, but mildly unintersting, solo.

SilverStone DS351

David Murphy — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:23:30 -0600

We have 300 words to tell you about the wonders of SilverStone’s DS351 external hard drive enclosure, but we need just four syllables: me-di-o-cre. It’s not that the enclosure is overwhelmingly slow, broken, or impossible to manage, but the device dips its toe enough into each of each these categories to make for a less than stellar experience.

First, there’s the installation. The DS351 comes with a drive bay of sorts that you have to separate and remove from the unit before you can fill it with storage devices. Up to four drives go in the bay; the fifth drive attaches directly to the enclosure. Removing the bay requires the use of a long-necked screwdriver. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but once you’ve run through your house and realized that all you have are smaller, stouter screwdrivers, you’re hosed. Seriously, SilverStone—there are better ways to hold hard drives.

Firing up a RAID array is easy once the drives are in place. The included software is straightforward, and you don’t even have to muck around in Windows’s drive-management screens or initialize any drives. You pick your RAID, apply the change, and that’s it—done and done.

The performance of said RAID, however, leaves something to be desired. When we connected a single Western Digital Raptor drive to the DS351, we found that the enclosure’s speeds matched the performance of the same Raptor drive connected directly to the motherboard via SATA. Two Raptor drives in a RAID 0 array on the DS351 ended up being faster than a single drive but didn’t offer the absurd jumps in speeds we’re used to seeing in these comparisons—perfectly evidenced in the DS351’s poor RAID 1 performance.

Like a baloney sandwich, the DS351 will get you by, but it won’t be all that tasty—we’ve devoured far better enclosures.

Maxtor OneTouch 4

David Murphy — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:29:36 -0600

We were about to lead off this review with a Nelson Muntz-style “ha-ha” at Seagate, whose 750GB FreeAgent Pro has now fallen from the top of our external storage rankings thanks to Maxtor’s OneTouch 4. And then we remembered that Seagate now owns Maxtor. Whoops.

The OneTouch 4 is easily the fastest non-RAID, USB-based external device we’ve tested. That’s a lot of modifiers, but we don’t want to give credit where it isn’t due. Yes, there are bigger enclosures—Western Digital has terabyte-size external storage devices. And, yes, there are enclosures with more than just a USB connection—just look at Seagate’s own FreeAgent Pro.

But if you don’t have eSATA or FireWire, the OneTouch 4 represents the pinnacle of speedy portable storage. The device comes with included backup software that sucks up nearly 60MB of space on the drive, but it’s space well utilized—the software lets you perform backups and synchronizations in a very unobtrusive manner.

A few design flaws—like the absence of a power switch–keep the OneTouch 4 out of the Storage Hall of Fame, but while we can critique the nitty-gritty, we can’t overlook the speed or software. Coupled together, they make for a great storage device.

Fabrik Simpletech Duo Pro

David Murphy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:18:00 -0600

There’s not a lot to say about Fabrik’s Simpletech Duo Pro Drive. That’s not for any lack of remarkableness or underperformance on the part of the device itself. It’s just as plain-Jane as a storage unit can get.

The Duo Pro is two terabytes of storage in a single boxy enclosure. You get some backup software included in the mix, the caveat being that it doesn’t come on a CD, nor could we find any way to re-download the software from Fabrik’s web site. Let that be a fair warning to anyone who opens the Duo Pro box and immediately thinks, “hey, I’d like to run this in RAID 1.” We did that, and nuked every bit of data (said backup software) on the drive. Whoops.

The drives themselves come configured in either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration. You adjust the setting by flicking a little switch in the rear of the device. Seems simple enough, right? Unfortunately, those are all the RAID options you get with the Duo Pro – there’s no way to just use the drives as two separate, individual volumes. And they aren’t even that fast.

The USB-connected speeds are virtually identical between both RAID setups – the connection itself being the limiting factor in the equation. But this leaves us scratching our heads a little bit, as we’ve seen faster, non-RAID external storage units on an ol’ USB connection. We can’t complain much about the eSATA performance of the Duo Pro in its striped, RAID 0 mode. It’s fast. But we’re not entirely convinced that the performance is as apt as it could be.

When we stuck the Duo Pro in a slower RAID 1 mode, we noted that the speed of the configuration was nearly identical to one of the slower, single-terabyte drives we’ve tested – Western Digital’s Caviar GP. A mirror configuration should at least be able to overtake the performance of a single drive, especially the slowest terabyte drive we’ve ever reviewed.

So where does that leave the Duo Pro? It’s a solid external enclosure if you have a free eSATA connection, love living on the edge with RAID 0, and have no desire for anything more than storage-in-a-box. It’s a very simple device for a very specific purpose; we think power users will clamor for more options, speed, and looks, but as far as two-terabyte external storage devices go, the Duo Pro holds its weight.

Icy Dock MB664US-1S

David Murphy — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:06:51 -0600

Finally, somebody gets it right.

Although it seems impossible, we have reached an apex of technology in the exciting world of external storage. Icy Dock’s MB664US-1S hard drive enclosure is an absolute dream come true. It’s a marvel of functionality and form, a shining beacon that serves as an example to every competing product we’ve come across. It is the steel-colored Lancelot of your storage needs, the kind of friend you hope your hard drive keeps for the entirety of its life span. With the MB664US-1S, your data will stay safe, speedy, and easily swappable.

The MB664US-1S connects to your computer using either the nigh-antiquated USB protocol or fresh and speedy eSATA. Speeds for the two are just as fast as they could be. We tested the device using a 150GB Western Digital Raptor drive and found that the hard drive utterly fills the pipe. The MB664US-1S doesn’t hamper performance in the slightest, as eSATA speeds were nearly identical to the figures we received when we connected the drive directly to the motherboard. That’s the kind of performance we like to see from an external enclosure.

But eSATA and USB are hardly new features for an external device. We love the MB664US-1S for its fringe benefits, like its totally screwless design. To mount a hard drive, you simply push on the front of the unit—the front bezel slides up and you insert the drive into the device’s hot-swap-style bay. Push the bezel back down and you’re good to go; it’s that simple.
This might seem obsessive, but we adore the MB664US-1S’s feet. The rubber-tipped mechanisms do an OK job of keeping the device vertical by default, but you can get better balance by swinging them out to the sides to create a sort of landing gear for the enclosure. Indeed, Icy Dock has left no stone unturned when it comes to usefulness. And for that, we leave no Kick Ass unrewarded.