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Que! M2 QuadSlim Drive Review
I've never been much of a fan of middle-of-the-road solutions. My taste in cars, for instance, has always run to big, rear wheel drive American cars, extended cab pick-up trucks, and full-size vans, or to small, four-cylinder sedans and sports cars. "Mid-size" has never much appealed to me. I like clearly defined categories, and find it notable that the root of "mediocre," -- "media," pertains to "the middle way" -- a compromise. It's the same with computers. I like them either big or small. I was partial to the original compact Macs, but I have always been smitten with the hulking great, "wicked fast" Mac II FX, although I never owned one. My two main computers right now are a PowerBook, and a great big old UMAX S-900 tower, with seven drive bays, six PCI slots, and eight RAM slots -- representing a polarity of size and expandability. Which brings me to the subject of this review -- the QPS Que! M2 Quadslim external FireWire hard drive, which, if it was an automobile, would be a lithe, light, agile, sports car -- a Mazda Miata perhaps, or a Honda S - 2000. This little jewel of a hard drive has been, along with its QueFire! CD-RW drive cousin that I will be reviewing here soon, my hands-on introduction to FireWire, and I like what I've experienced so far. The M2 is so cool its ice-toned plastic case almost seems like it should be cold to touch. 
Not only is it fast, it is, according to QPS, the first and only shock-protected computer storage media device in the world, which means that if you're a PowerBook owner, you can pack the Quadslim around with you in your pocket or on the included belt clip, and use it while computing on the move. That there is also a convenient suction cup that allows you to temporarily mount the M2 on any flat, non-porous surface. Neat. The M2 supports hot-docking and hot-stacking connectability, which allows you to create your own compact RAID array of up to five drives by stacking and interlocking the units' vertical FireWire connectors on the top and bottom of each drive. By stacking five 30GB drives, a user can obtain 150 GB of RAID-ready storage connected to their computer through a single FireWire cable, in a package that is still conveniently portable. You can stack up to 10 M2s, using the optional 2U-10-bay rack mount accessory kit. And of course, being a FireWire device, the Que! M2 is hot-pluggable, and supports not only FireWire equipped computers (Mac and PC), but also digital camcorders. I checked out a 6 gigabyte Que! M2 on three computers -- my workhorse WallStreet PowerBook; my UMAX S-900 200 MHz, 604e desktop; and my son's 333 MHz Lombard PowerBook. None of these computers came with factory FireWire , but have been upgraded to FireWire support with PC cards for the PowerBooks, and a PCI adapter card for the UMAX. All three machines are running Mac OS 9.1, which includes FireWire drivers. The Lombard also had a Mac OS X beta installed, so we tested the drive with that as well. One of the first things you notice about The Que! M2 when you first power it up his how silent it is. You literally have to put your ear to the case to confirm audibly that it is running, although there are green power-on and red activity LEDs for visual confirmation. Hooking up the M2 is simplicity itself. You just plug one end of a FireWire cable into the FireWire port on the back of the unit (there are also two other FireWire ports on the drive), and the other end into the computer, or on our older PowerBooks, into the PC Card FireWire adapter dongle. There is a little printed quick start installation manual, and a PDF manual with expanded content on the CD. The print one was quite adequate to get us up and running. The M2 drive comes formatted, but if you want to initialize, reformat, or partition it, you can use the CharisMac Anubis formatting software that is included on the installation CD. The CharisMac installer on the CD installs the formatter and a drive mounting utility on our drive, and drops a couple of small device driver extensions in the System Folder. Restart the Mac, and you're ready to go. Or almost ready to go in some cases. The M2 drive is bus powered where supported, and it powered up nicely through the MacAlly PCI card adapter on the UMAX S-900, but I was not able to get it to power up through the PC Card FireWire adapters on the PowerBooks. The installation manual notes that some notebook PC's may need the external power adapter even if they have a built-in FireWire part, but there is no such comment about Macs. Nevertheless, for the two PowerBooks, I was obliged to use the included power adapter brick, which normally would only be required for a multi-drive array. This definitely takes some of the convenience of using the drive with a WallStreet or Lombard on the road. I did not have a Pismo or TiBook to try it with, but I think I'm pretty safe in assuming that PowerBooks (and Paris iBooks) with built-in FireWire would support powering the M2 drive through the FireWire bus, although this would necessarily diminish battery life to some degree. The M2 powers down automatically when it is not accessed for a few minutes, which would help how long battery life. Once the CharisMac device drivers were installed and the Macs rebooted, the M2 mounted automatically upon start-up on all the test machines. Actually, we had no problem getting it to mount on the PowerBooks running under OS 9.1 (and OS X on the Lombard) even without the device drivers installed, but you had to have the drive powered up with the power adapter before booting the computer in that case. Mac OS 9.0 required the drivers. The drive appears on the desktop as a volume icon. When the CharisMac drivers are installed, it has its own, unique icon; without them a generic Mac OS volume icon appears. Copy speeds are impressive, especially on the G3 machines. The Lombard copied a 513 MB test file to the M2 in two minutes, 30 seconds. Even on the 200 MHz, 604e UMAX, it copied my 104 MB Eudora email archive file in one minute, three seconds, which is not bad at all for that machine. Speaking of which, the instruction manual lists a G3 CPU with built-in FireWire ports as the minimum supported system specification. Being as none of the three Macs I tested the drive with have built-in FireWire ports, and the M2 drive works flawlessly on the old 200 MHz UMAX, I'd have to say that the specs are extremely conservative and/or pessimistic. I suspect that this unit will probably work with any Mac that can be upgraded to FireWire support and that will run Mac OS 9. This drive does not appear to be bootable, at least not on these FireWire upgraded machines. I dragged a copy of OS 9.1 onto the M2 and tried restarting from it using the Startup Disk control panel, but with no success. The Macs just restarted from the previously selected volume. The drive is not advertised as being bootable, and I'm not erudite enough in FireWire lore to know whether this is a hardware or software issue.. The Que! M2 Quadslim hard drive comes in a very spiffy padded carry case, with individual pockets and Velcro retaining straps for the drive, the power supply, cables, and accessories, which include the aforementioned belt clip and mounting suction cup and two FireWire cables, one 6-pin to 6-pin, and one 4-pin to 6-pin. The Que! M2 drive comes in four configurations: 6GB priced at $279; 10GB at $379; 20GB at $479; and 30GB at $579. They have a 13ms average seek time, a buffer size of 1024K and a transfer rate up to 16.6 Mbytes per second. With its modest 4200 RPM rotation speed, and since it is a 2.5" ATA unit, I'm guessing that it's very similar to the IDE drives used in PowerBooks. The bundled CD includes the CharisMac utility and drivers, and Radialogic StorageMaster, as well as Retrospect Express Backup software which provides users with the ability to do unattended incremental backups with flexible media rotation Because it is hot-pluggable, this drive is very convenient for file transfers between two or more computers. To unmount the drive, just drag its icon to the trash, and then unplug it. The Que! M2 is of course also ideal for backups and storage of things like large graphics files and MP3 collections. After battling the idiosyncrasies and weirdnesses of SCSI all these years, the no-hassle flexibility and user-friendliness of FireWire is a breath of fresh air, and the Que! M2 drive is a superb product. It feels very solid, and appears to be made of high quality materials, with excellent build quality. If it would boot my computer, it would be well nigh perfect, but as it does everything it is advertised to do, and does it with elegance, five Mac OS smileys are still in order. Hot:
Not so hot:
 For more information, visit:
Special thanks to Dave Schultz at Applelust.com, who arranged for me to get this product to test. For Daves impressions of the M2 drive, visit: Appendix QPS Que! M2 QuadSlim Drive Features: • Voltage 5v ± 5%
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