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The design is excellent, but there were two noticeable flaws. While it makes sense that there
would be only one USB port, there should be two Firewire ports. Firewire is a chaining protocol,
meaning that you can chain firewire devices all to a single firewire port. I rarely see an external
firewire drive with only one port, and this is one of the exceptions. Without that 2nd port, I
cannot hook up another firewire drive, or any other firewire device, unless I have an additional
firewire port available on my Mac. That is not always convenient to get to, and in some cases,
the other ports are already in use. I have my iSight plugged into one port, and I keep my
firewire disk drive chain on the other port. If I wanted to hook up another firewire device, such
as my Sony digital video camera, I would have to unplug one of my drives, or the iSight, to plug
in the device. It would be a tremendous improvement and convenience to the consumer to have
a 2nd firewire port added.
The other issue I had with the design of the drive was the power plug. The AC plug on the power
adapter had a very unusual shape. The plug was designed such that the wire goes to the side of
the plug instead of dropping down (see picture below). The only situation I believe this design
accommodates is plugging it into the top outlet of a wall jack. However, I think it is far more
typical for most home computer users to use surge protected power strips for computer devices,
and on a power strip, the plugs are typically aligned such that the prongs are all parallel. All 5 of
my power strips are designed in that fashion. That means that the SimpleDrive plug not only
covers more than one outline (even on the oversized outlets), but the wire goes off to the side,
interfering with anything to the left of it. The work around is to simply plug it into the outlet at
the far end of the power strip, which is not a big deal in this case, since this is the only power
plug I have that is designed like this.
The power plug blocking another outlet even on my oversize outlets
Both of these design flaws appear to be oversights, and easily fixable. The plug issue has a
simple work around, while the lack of a 2nd firewire port is a little more frustrating. Neither of
these issues, however, interfere with the use or the performance of the hard drive. Despite
these flaws, I really like the overall design of the SimpleDrive. It looks good sitting next to my
Mac, and does not take up very much space on my desk.
In Use
The SimpleDrive looks nice, but how well does it transfer data to and from my Mac? I'm happy
to report that the drive does not compromise on its functionality. It performed perfectly in all my
tests, and provided fast and reliable data transfers. In one test, I copied 48GB from my internal
hard drive to the SimpleDrive, and it copied in less than 30 minutes. Of course, the number of
files you copy will impact the speed of the transfer as well. The 48GB was a balance of small and
large files. In a separate test, I copied 15GB that was made up of over 90,000 files, and it took
about the same amount of time to copy as the 48 GB. Overall, I was quite impressed with the
speed.
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Mac Guild Review
10/17/2005
http://mac
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guild.org/reviews/review326.html