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Consequently, external hard drives are one of the hottest-selling computer peripherals these days. Another factor boosting external hard drive sales is the exploding popularity of digital photography and video on personal computers, with the often super-sized files requiring storage space - lots of it, a need nicely addressed by the latest multi–terabyte hard drives that are now the cutting edge.
Here are reviews of two excellent choices in Mac compatible, multi-interface external hard drives.
G-Technology G-Drive Professional External Hard Drive
The G-Drive Professional External Hard Drive (formerly G-Drive Q) comes out-of-the-box Mac-formatted and Time Machine ready for true plug in and play convenience. This is an extremely robust unit that fairly hollers "professional grade hardware."
One thing that will particularly appeal to Mac-users about this product is that the G-Technology has obviously made Mac-friendliness a priority, rather than adding Mac support as an afterthought playing second fiddle to Windows-compatibility, which is the case with some competing products.
For example, the G-Drive Professional External Hard Drive comes out-of-the-box Mac-formatted and Time Machine ready for true plug in and play convenience. Then there's the drive's all-aluminum housing, whose styling and engineering are obviously Apple-influenced, complementing current Apple styling conventions harmoniously. The perforated aluminum end panels are especially reminiscent of Apple's Mac Pro tower machines. The aluminum enclosure is also 100% recyclable, giving this unit serious "green" credentials.
G-Drive is also a very rugged piece of equipment - probably the most robust such product this reviewer has yet encountered.
Another cool feature - literally - is a built-in finned aluminum heat sink that helps dissipate heat generated by the 7200 RPM Hitachi SATA 2 hard drive (with up to 32 MB cache) by passive convection without resorting to noisy cooling fans. It isn't whisper-quiet by any means. There's a full-sized 7,200 RPM 3.5" hard drive in there after all, but as with the unibody MacBook Pros, the solid aluminum housing seems to deaden internal noise somewhat.
As noted, the G.-Drive professional hard drive features a quad I/O interface, with a 3 Gbit eSATA port, two FireWire 800 ports - which also support FireWire 400 with the included adapter cable, and a USB 2.0 port.
Also as mentioned above, the drive comes formatted for Mac (HFS + journaled) and is Apple Time Machine ready out-of-the-box. it sports the acclaimed Oxford 934 chipset, and supports MacOS X 10.3 and higher, and Windows Vista, XP, 2000 , and Windows 7. G-Drive also supports professional music production tools including Pro Tools, Logic Studio, Cubase, Nuendo, Digital Performer, and others.
At 9.25" x 1.25" x .82" (230 x 130 x 46 mm), and weighing in at 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg), the G-Drive is no lightweight pocket drive (a mini G-Drive is available, however), but as I mentioned, this is an extremely robust unit that fairly hollers "professional grade hardware."
And when I say heavy-gauge, I'm not kidding. The G-Drive's enclosure is all-aluminum, but it's not what you could call lightweight, being a very solid, substantial and presumably rugged piece of equipment.
Bundled in the package with the drive unit are an AC power supply (100 - 240 v), a FireWire 800 cable, a FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 cable, and eSATA cable, and a USB 2.0 cable, measuring 1.8 m, 1.8 m, 1.6 m, and 1.0 m respectively.
Since this particular drive has nominally 2 TB of storage capacity, which seems awesomely a lot to me, at least if one is not into video and/or high-end graphics work. I decided that at least two partitions would be sensible, which would among other things permit installing two different operating systems and/or separate clones of my computer's main hard drive. Partitioning was accomplished in minutes using OS X Disk Utility, and I was away to the races.
I tried a clone of my my 2.0 GHz unibody MacBook's main hard drive using USB 2.0 and Carbon Copy Cloner (has no FireWire port), and it took only an hour and 40 minutes to clone 68.7 GB of data (808,183 files) on a 108.3 GB partition, and that was running in the background while I continued doing other work. Fastest data transfer I've ever experienced with USB 2.0.
A flashing light on the front of the unit indicates drive write activity.I also tried Disk Utility's own "Restore" function to make a second clone of my hard drive on the other partition. While it doesn't offer Carbon Copy Cloner's depth of features and options, Disk Utility works fine. Just drag the names of the source and destination drives to the respectively appropriate fields in the Disk Utility Restore pane, click the button, and let the software do its stuff. The Disk Utility clone run took one hour and 51 minutes for 42.97 GB representing 805,511 files, again mostly running in the background while I surfed the Internet and did some text crunching and graphics editing. It's nicely integrated and doesnt slow things down much.
Of course, I'd still rather have FireWire, but a fast USB drive like the G-Drive Professional definitely makes running a FireWire-less MacBook much less of a compromise.
And if you do have FireWire support, the G-Drive Professional features a quad I/O interface, and supports that too -- both FireWire 800, and facilitated by an included adapter cable, FireWire 400 as well, from its two FW 800 ports. For good measure, there is also a 3 Gbit eSATA port which can be useful if your have a MacBook Pro model equipped with an ExpressCard 34 expansion port or a Mac Pro tower.
Unfortunately, there is no hard copy documentation whatsoever, other than what's printed on the shipping box, but there is a digital product manual delivered on CD media, and online backup is available at http://www.g-technology.com/support . Product registration is also online at http://www.g-technology.com/register .
G-DRIVE is backed by a standard 3-year factory warranty and unlimited free technical support
G-Drive is available in three capacities - 500GB at $149.99, 1 TB at $199.99, and 2 TB at $349.99
For more information, visit:
http://www.g-technology.com
and
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm
SimpleTech PRO1000Q Pro Drive Quad Interface 1TB External Hard Drive
The SimpleDrive Pro Drive comes in 500 gigabyte, 750 gigabyte, and one terabyte capacities. Our test unit was the 1 TB model.
They Pro Drive is attractively-styled in a businesslike way, befitting a machine pitched as "professional - grade storage and backup," and with its silver and grey two=tone plastic housing, which measures 7.8 x 5.5 x 2.5 inches, will harmonize as nicely with any Apple Computer.
This drive's main distinction, however, is not its looks, but rather it's quad I/0 interface, supporting USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and 3GB/sec eIATA, which should have all your I/O bases covered whatever your computer hardware, including very high speed options where supported, but it will also work just fine for Time Machine backups via USB 2.0, if that's all your system supports, for example, if you have a MacBook Air or one of the unibody MacBooks.
Many Macs built over the past ten years have have FireWire 400, and many of the higher-end models support FireWire 800 as well (I even have a FireWire 800 PC Card adapter for my old 2000 Pismo PowerBooks), and FireWire is the no-hassle speedy choice for those machines. USB 2 is inferior to FireWire, but the main I/o medium Apple has chosen for the present.
The Duo Pro comes bundled with proprietary data backup software, but most Mac users purchasing this drive will presumably opt for Time Machine or perhaps another good Mac backup application like Carbon Copy Cloner.
The SimpleTech Pro Drive is designed to be used upright, lying flat, or flat in stacks, is equipped with a security lock slot, works with Mac OS 10.3 or higher or Windows 2000/XP/Vista, and is covered by a three-year warranty. There is also free, unlimited tech support for the duration of the warranty.
The front of the Pro Drive Housing is simple, with just a product logo and a power-on/read/write activity light. On the back panel you will find a rocker power on/off switch, ventilation ports, the AC power adapter jack and a Kensington security lock slot, and the quad USB 2.0, FireWire 1394a, FireWire 1394 and eSATA ports.
The Pro Drive comes formatted in NFTS, which is a Windows-oriented format that is read-only for Macs. In order to be able to write data to the drive, it will first have to be reformatted, the which of course destroys all the data on the drive.
The "Getting Started" guide that ships on the drive walks you through various formatting options if you need to get up to speed with that, so it's best to download it to another volume before reformatting. The most useful format for Mac users will be Mac OS Extended, but if you want to be able to use the drive with both Macs and PCs you may want to use MS/DOS FAT 32 format, with but although that imposes some limitations, such as a 4 gigabyte file size limit. You will also have to use Windows file naming conventions.
If you want to be able to the boot from the drive, which is extremely convenient, you also need to pay attention to the the partition map protocol used for formatting. For booting Intel based Macs, you will want the GUID Partition Map, while the Apple Partition Map option is suitable for booting Power PC Macs. You can specify your chosen partition map option in the Options sheet of the OS X Disk Utility formatting pane.
Hooked up to my G4 PowerBook, I found the Pro Drive a tad slow to mount over the FireWire 400 interface, but it was fast copying files once it got up and running. FireWire 800 offers even faster throughput, and desktop users with PCI expansion slots can take advantage of Pro Drive’s claimed to be even faster SATA interface, which delivers up to 3X the speed of USB 2.0. However, performance is acceptable using a USB 2.0 port on my FireWire-less aluminum unibody MacBook, and it boots fine from these external hard drives via USB 2.0 as well.
The Pro Drive comes with bundled USB and FireWire 400 cables, an AC power adapter, and 2 GB of free online Fabrik Ultimate Backup space (greater capacity can be had for fee), free unlimited tech support. FireWire 400 and/or eSATA connection cabling must be purchased separately.
For more information, visit:
http://www.simpletech.com/products/storage/pro-drive
Charles W. Moore
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