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Some of the stories are heartbreaking, involving the loss of a replaceable photo collections or like the experience of the lady I saw on our local TV news recently whose laptop had been stolen from her home, holding the only copy of her stream of consciousness journal documenting her struggle with and recovery from a life–threatening illness. Nevertheless, you can encourage people to back up till you're blue in the face, but also awful lot of them will ignore or procrastinate until it's too late.
Theft isn't the only hazard to your data. If you use computers for long enough, eventually you're going to have a hard drive failure, sometimes with little or no warning.
I keep sequential backups of all the data on my main computer's hard drive in parentheses which is only 160 GB). My smallest external is 500 GB.
External hard drives come in an array of shapes, sizes, and capacities, but if you're a laptop user on the go or have limited desktop space in your office or dorm room, a relatively compact unit is ideal, and Apricorn's new Aegis NetDock offers the advantage of compact dimensions with a built–in 2.5-inch hard drive or solid state drive of various capacities (our test unit is a 1 TB HDD). But that's not all. While it's not quite as comprehensively "dockable" as Apple's '90s-era Duo PowerBooks (there's no provision for memory expansion or expansion card slots), the Aegis NetDock is also a four–port, self–powered USB 2.0 hub, and in addition toe the hard drive also has a trade–loading optical CD/DVD burner/player drive, which makes it especially well-suited as a companion peripheral for the optical drive-less MacBook Air or many PC netbooks. Two of the most frequent criticisms of the MacBook Air since it hit the market in 2008 are its poverty of I/O ports (just one USB 2.0 port plus a Micro-DVI port and a headphone jack in a cramped array) and its mediocre data storage capacity on either an iPod-sized hard disk or optional optical SSD, neither having been available in capacities larger than 120 GB. Neither does the smallest MacBook have an internal optical drive.
The Aegis NetDock provides the missing USB connectivity, storage drive capacity up to the largest 2.5 inch HDD's available (currently 640 GB), and an optical drive in a package with a footprint just a bit larger than a CD jewel case (6.25" x 5 .7" x 2 .125"). Like the Duo Docks of yore, the NetDock facilitates enhanced desktop mode functionality while retaining an ultralight's easy-to-carry portability when it's untethered. At home or the office it connects to your computer by plugging in a single USB cable.
When it's time to hit the road, all you need do is pop the USB cable connector, slip your 'Book into its travel case, and you're away. To reconnect upon your return, just plug the USB connector back in and you're ready to roll. The NetDock's four USB ports are convenient for connecting keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, and other USB peripherals, or connecting digital cameras Two of the USB ports are “always on” making them capable of charging your iPad, iPhone, or iPod with your computer sleeping or shut down.
With its sporty candy apple red finish, the Apricorn Aegis NetDock is also very attractive in appearance, at least I think so. Versatile too. It is comfortably carried in one hand, and will be an easy, lightweight fit in most computer bags or backpacks, making it no hardship to take along when you're mobile, and it can be used lying flat on the desktop, table, or other support surface (best for using the tray–loading optical drive), or mounted in its slide-in base stand that holds it securely in an upright and space-efficient vertical orientation, perhaps perched on a bookshelf.
The NetDock is Mac and PC compatible, and can be used with a variety of computers. The auto on and off power management system powers down the NetDock when it's not in use, but powers back up again when you connect it to a live USB port.
Officially, the Aegis NetDock supports PCs running Windows 7, XP, or Vista with a minimum 1 GHz Intel Pentium or Atom CPU. Macs with G3 or later processors running at minimum OS X. 10.4 or later are also supported. The bundle of BurnAware CD/DVD burning software, VLC Media Player software, and Microsoft SyncToy synchronization software on the included DVD is not supported by the Mac, but you won't miss it. Disc burning and media playback are handled nicely by the Mac's Finder, Disk Utility, and QuickTime software, and smart backups by OS X's Time Machine utility, and if you need synchronization software it's hard to beat Michael Bombich's donationware Carbon Copy Cloner.
The NetDock can be purchased with or without a hard drive installed, so if you have any pulled SATA 2.5 inch drives left over from upgrading your computer's internal drive, one of these docks is a great way to put it back to work and a whole lot more. Installing or swapping drive modules is a breeze. The enclosure can be opened for access to the drive by removing a single screw, and the drive just slides in or out, secured in place by two more screws.
The front side of the unit is occupied by the pop–out optical drive tray and a drive activity LED, while the backside port array includes the four USB ports, the mini USB connector port for computer interface, and the AC adapter power port. The included stand grips the drive module securely but smoothly between its soft, rubbery, contact surfaces, and has a wide enough stance to prevent easy tipovers.
Functionality-wise, the NetDock powered up smartly and mounted with no fuss when I connected the power adapter and plugged in the USB cable. The drive comes formatted MS-DOS, so the first order of business was to reinitialize the drive in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. I also took the opportunity to partition the 500 GB drive that came installed in our tester in GUID Partition Table format, which makes it bootable with Mac Intel computers. It worked out to be 300 GB and 165 GB partitions -- plenty of room on either for a backup and storage since my MacBook's internal drive is just 160 GB. The reformatting and partitioning was executed slickly and quickly using OS X Disk Utility.
Cloning the main partition of my computer's hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner took roughly 2 1/2 hours, which is pretty much par for the course with external drives through a USB 2.0 interface. I have several 3.5" 7200 RPM external hard drives, but for large data transfers, the USB 2.0 interface rather than the relative spin-speed of the hard drive module is the main bottleneck. A major advantage to the NetDock's laptop–size 2.5 inch drive module is that it is very quiet compared with some of the screamer 3.5" 7200 RPM units, and I of course if you install an SSD, it will be dead silent.
In summary, I really like the Apricorn Aegis NetDock both conceptually and in practical use. It is delightfully compact and easy to handle, versatile, works as advertised, and you can never have too many USB ports -- IMHO. FireWire or eSATA connectivity would be icing on the proverbial cake, but for the type of light–to-medium duty tasks this unit will be mostly applied to, USB 2.0 is fine. The NetBook is as noted particularly well–suited to the MacBook Air, but should be a welcome and useful accessory for virtually any notebook or netbook.
I'm giving the Apricorn Aegis NetDock a 4.5 star rating out of a possible 5.
Apricorn Aegis NetDock prices range from $89.00 for the basic unit with no hard drive installed, to $149.00 with a 250GB hard drive in situ and $179.00 with a 500GB drive loaded.
For more information, visit:
http://www.apricorn.com/index.php
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