Actually, it is not A hard drive, since it has two drives inside, that is the reason the case is so massive. The case is made completely of brushed aluminium, a perfect design match to a Mac Pro or a new iMac. Indeed, it came formated with HFS+ (mac filesystem).
What makes this drive special, is its performance. The Drive comes configured as a Raid0, providing speeds up to 70Mb/s of sustained read. To achieve this awesome performance, the drives provide two Firewire800 connectors; Despite very rare on pc's, we can easily find this interface on mac pro, iMac and even MacBook Pro as an standard component. For further compatibility it also comes with usb2.0 and firewire400 connectors, which are mainstream.
Another interesting feature about its connectivity is that it has 3 usb ports and another 3 firewire ports, so you even add connectors when attaching to your computer, nice detail!!
Performance is astonishing, providing constant 70Mb/s through firewire800, 40Mb/s with firewire400 and 30Mb/s with USB2.0; Even with Fw800, this drive is interface limited!!
Compared to the newest and biggest 750gb and 1Tb single sata drives, this speed might not seem to high, but for laptop users or iMac users, getting this performance with an external device is awesome!!
Comparing speeds between interfaces makes clear usb is only meant for times when we have to use it with computers without firewire, since it is the slowest and most resources demanding of the three.
Because I use a Sony Vaio, not a pro Mac, I haven't got any firewire800 embedded on the notebook. The solution was difficult, since firewire800 cards are difficult to find and purchase despite I could go for an express card or a PCMCIA device. I found the solution through ebay, spending 50% less than buying to a specialized shop. First I got an Apiotek card, but it didn't work, with 10 or more computers that I tried; The funny thing is it worked fine with 2 different Fujitsu-Siemens computers, no idea why.
The ebay seller changed the card for another one, without any kind of name on it, and with funny caution advices on the base:
All in all, the drive runs smoothly, well, smoothly but noisy; The fan changes speed and sometimes it becomes REALLY annoying. I assume it is because of the metal case, since it is not soft attached. Being this professional oriented, it is a big deffect, specially for those of us with almost silent computers.
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