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Strengths: Very fast
Easy set up
Weaknesses: Formatting took a while
Summary: The set up on this was a breeze. I read the manual before I set it up (being a cautious sort) but I needn't have bothered. You can set this up in a couple of minutes without looking at the manual if you've ever installed any USB device before - although it's always good to look at the manual for safety's sake :-)
I bought this drive as a back-up drive for some of my files (I don't intend keeping my only copy of anything on here). After I had set it up and formatted it, I backed up some files. It took about a minute per gig, which seems acceptable to me. However, I decided to try a little experiment just to see how fast the drive was. I loaded the original Unreal onto it. Old game I know, but I was curious if I could play directly off of this drive as if it was my main hard drive. And guess what - the game ran perfectly. So, I then tried the original Unreal Tournament with all the settings maxed out - and it ran perfectly. As a final test, I installed and ran the F.E.A.R. single player demo. Again, it ran (although there seemed to be an occassional microsecond of jerkiness - no framerate slow down though and nothing that would stop you playing the game - just not as smooth as my internal hard-drive). In my mind, this is phenomenal - far more than I expected from a mere "back-up" drive. I tried running separate video and audio files simultaneously (not that you'd need to do that unless you want to watch a silent movie mpeg and put your own music to it or something esoteric like that) and it handled both files without skipping a beat/frame.
(BTW - I'm running an Pentium 4 3.2 with a gig of RAM and a Radeon 800-something card).
It runs pretty silently. The occassional cranking noise when I started up the games mentioned above but even that wasn't excessive.
It gets a little warm but doesn't get hot.
The only minor niggle (and it really is minor) was the formatting. The drive comes pre-formatted using the FAT 32 file system, so you can use it straight out of the box if you want. However, there are some advantages to using the NTFS file system instead (so says the manual), so I reformatted it to NTFS. This is really simple to do following the instructions in the manual. However, it said this should take up to 90 minutes, whereas it took my beige beast about 4 hours to do this. Not a big deal really - just went away and did something else for a while.
One weird thing though - the manual says not to place it on it's side but all the pictures show it like that and it comes with a mount for using it on its side. I assume the manual is wrong but, as I have plenty of desk space, I have it lying flat.
I only just set this up today. If I experience any problems with it, I will update the post. However, it comes with a 1 year warranty and I use AMEX, so I have an extra year's warranty on it through that. Here's hoping I don't need to use either :-)
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