Conclusion
The first page of the article sums things up fairly well really. There's external disk storage to suit all budgets and tastes these days, just don't expect it to perform miracles in the performance stakes if you're using FireWire or USB2.0. The interfaces conspired to limit speeds on the best performing disks and some results were just downright weird, especially on things like the 1MB ATTO test. The interfaces just don't seem to work well with small transfer sizes for example, either read or write.It's pretty clear that the strengths in the disks I looked at for this article lie outside of their ability to function in something like a non-linear video editing array. They'll do well as off-line or near-line storage devices, for dumping scratch data, as simple, portable archives of loads of files or other scenarios where performance isn't critical. That's what they are designed for.
As portable storage, the OneTouch 300GB rules itself out slightly due to weight, whereas the Freecom absolutely shines. In some ways, the Freecom is what impressed me most out of the four drives tested. It slipped into a pocket, didn't need an external power supply and wasn't stupidly poor in the benchmarks or general usage. It was a huge bonus when I was moving files around a load of benchmark systems recently and I'll be sad to see it go. Plug into a USB port, wait a few seconds for the OS to see it, use as normal. You can't argue with that.
The Maxtors seem to make a lot of sense for places like design houses that have a lot of mixed Mac and PC equipment. All of them feature FireWire ports, the standard serial bus on Macs for a while now. For moving huge multi-GB files between disparate systems in an office, without it hitting the network too much, or for taking huge swathes of video data to a post-processing house for futher editing. That's what those disks are designed for.
The 3000-series disks are cheap and make sense for a home or personal user that wants to move data around, portably, without too much fuss. The 5000-series takes that one step further and gives you dual-interface support. The OneTouch system adds backup software to the mix, making the disks usable in a home scenario for changeable disk storage, one scenario where performance doesn't matter too much.
There's something for everyone in the four disks on test, I'm just more tempted to add other disk to an ATX chassis, rather than hang it externally. Like everything, you'll know instantly if external disk storage is for you. I guess the whole point is that it's doable without breaking the bank these days.
As for a winner? For me, it's the Freecom for the reasons I outlined above. It was geniunely useful, I loved it, despite the snail's pace. I think I might even pick one up, USB bus power is godlike.
I'll restrain myself from scoring any of the disks out of ten. They are specialist devices still; each has a niche, each will find customers. More of a guide article than a review in that sense.
Thanks
A big thanks to Scan International for the samples.Alex for the pictures.
