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Review: VST Bus-Powered Ultra-Thin FireWire Hard DrivesReviewed By: Brent Hecht Review Date: April 28, 2001 One of Apple's main motivations for including FireWire in most of its new computer models was to replace the aging SCSI bus with something more modern and easy-to-use. Unfortunately, for a while, Apple was serious hampered by the lack of SCSI-type peripherals available for FireWire. Enter VST with its bus-powered line of FireWire hard drives. VST's hard drive goes way beyond simply providing what was already available for SCSI. Instead, it makes the whole experience of installing and using a hard drive - dare I say it - pleasurable! Installation of the VST FireWire hard drive is simply a breeze. All I did was plug in the FireWire cable into the hard drive’s port and my Powerbook's port and - whammo! - the disk mounted on my desktop. I formatted the disk using the included formatting utility and literally within three minutes, I was ready to start loading my data on to the drive. It doesn't get any easier than this folks. In addition, the drive installation works just as flawlessly in Mac OS X. Once installed, the VST drive acts like any other non-removable hard drive. In terms of speed, the drive is not the fastest, but compared to zip disks and USB hard drives, the FireWire drive simply burns. Using Mac OS X, I copied 50MB of data from the internal hard drive to the FireWire drive in only 14 seconds. Pretty sweet. If you don't use the drive for any extremely intensive tasks such as video editing, you should be fine. In terms of form and style, the VST drive passes with flying colors. The drive easily fits in the palm of a hand or a pocket and requires no external power supply - it gets all of its power from the FireWire bus. Bottom line: I simply have no complaints about this stellar drive. If you need a new hard drive, you have a FireWire system, and you are willing to spend the cash for an external FireWire version, buy a VST.
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