Mac Guild Review | Page 3 of 5 |
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.
10/17/2005 |