Pros
- Fast FireWire 800
- Cables included
- Timemachine ready
- Packed with tons of software
- Quality build
Cons
- eSATA requires an external power source
- eSATA performance disappointing
The Bottom Line
OWC’s Mercury Elite line is a fantastic place to find quality and speedy accessories for your Mac or Windows box and this portable hard drive is not exception. Even though the eSATA figures didn’t impress as they should have, truth is, this a portable device that will encounter more FireWire and USB than eSATA which nearly negates the offense. You will not be disappointed slipping this hard drive into your pocket.
Ratings
Recommended
Yes
Full Review
The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini is fitted with a “Quad Interface” on the back that runs off the bus power of your FireWire or USB ports. OWC packed everything you’ll need in the box including high quality double shielded USB, FireWire 800, and eSATA cables. You will also find a DVD-ROM packed with Intech’s SpeedTools, Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup for OS X, NovaStorBACKUP for Windows, Carbon Copy Cloner – a favorite of mine – and over 2 GB of other goodies. Inside the slick “aircraft grade machined aluminum enclosure” of the Mercury one would find a 2.5″ SATA hard drive (OWC also offers solid state drives), a translucent blue activity LED, an ultra-protective shock system, and ports for connecting the mini to your computer. You will not find a fan in the super quiet unit since OWC uses the enclosure to rid the unit of heat build up from either the 5400 or 7200 RPM drives. When attached to your computer, instead of the standard OS icon, you’ll see a picture replica of the OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro mini – that’s a mouthful – on your desktop. Ya, between the blue LED and that, it makes the Mercury just that much cooler. 
Ratings
Pros
- Plethora of supported interfaces
- Supports any modern hard drive
- Sleek looking
- Drop-in hard drive mount
Cons
- No tactical indicator of successful drive mount
- Price is a bit high
The Bottom Line
If you’re like many in todays modern techno-family, then you have extra hard drives lying around your home. Additionally, with the low cost of hard drives today, there really is no reason not to have extras for archive purposes. Either way, NewerTech’s Voyager Q allows you immediate access to your data without any work other than dropping the drive into the Qs bay and double clicking an icon on your Desktop. Instant access with more ways to connect to your hard drive than James Bond ever associated with his Q.
Recommended
Yes
Full Review
Hard drives liter my draws, cabinets, and desk. They’re every where. Some are archived drives and others retired ones. Needless to say, accessing anything on them has required some work in the past with either mounting them internally in a PC or in an enclosure. Yes, there’s also many variants of the SATA/IDE to USB set-ups that can be used, too, but man, what a mess of cables that is. Thankfully, the folks at NewerTech live like me and desire a nice easy, clean, way of data retrieval. The Voyager Q has landed on my desk and what a relief it has provided. Can it offer your scrap pile of metal, platters, and silicon reprieve as well?
Pros
- Fast
- Great looking unit
- Small footprint
Cons
- Quality issues
- RAID1 failure in tests
The Bottom Line
LaCie has made one sleek looking external hard drive that begs for a spot on your desk to show off its good looks. However, if our data failure is any indication of troubles in mass, this is nothing more than a cheerleader on the football team that just looks hot but has no brains.
Ratings
Recommended
Maybe
Full Review
LaCie has been a well known accessory company for Apple for many years long before other companies pushing PC ware started dabbling into the Mac world. That experience has given a lead over those late comers that LaCie has enjoyed and used to push its products into a new realm of sleek looks. The HD Max is definitely one nice looking unit without a doubt with its shinny black case that reminded me of Darth Vader’s helmet when I first took it out of the box. The Dark Side had nothing to do with this cool looking external hard drive as LaCie tapped award-winning industrial designer Neil Poulton to come up with all this black goodness. When you hook up the power and cable the USB into your computer, Mac or PC, a blue light flickers from the bottom on the front of the unit bouncing memorizing light from the surface of your mount location. The light flashes as data is accessed adding to the pretty show on your desk. When you turn the unit around, you’ll find a switch that enables RAID0 or RAID1, two USB ports, a spot for your power, and switch for that power. You’ll also note two other LEDs one for each drive that show blue or the dreaded red for, oops, something’s very wrong, red. Except for the air vents in the back of the unit, the LaCie HD Max is just one nice piece of plastic covering the rectangle RAID hard drive that is small enough to easily hold in your hand.
Pros
- Super speedy
- Well engineered
- Quality build
Cons
- A bit pricey
- Front panel tricky to attach and close
The Bottom Line
With a slew of choices in the external hard drive market, it’s become difficult to pick the gems among the cubic zirconias. Thankfully companies such as OWC exist and continue to bring us diamonds like the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 which glimmers with excellence. In our month of testing, we found ourselves in love with this unit and nearly crying when we had to return it. It’s that good.
Ratings
Recommended
Yes (Strongly)
Full ReviewOther World Computing is known for its Mac accessories and stellar support since 1988. OWC has brought that experience and ventured into the hard drive space with its external storage solutions for some years now. Its latest venture is the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 which offers 2.0 TB to 8.0 TBs of space for your 1 and 0s to be placed on in an alpha bet soup of configuration choices. You can attach the Mercury drive to your Mac or PC by either FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0, or through the speedy eSATA connection. I chose to use the FW800 port in the back of my Mac Pro Dual-Core Intel Xeon box and – wow – did I notice the speed immediately. For fun, I copied over a few ripped DVDs from my Mac’s internal drive to the Mercury Elite and watched it go. When copying 7.86 GBs of data, one becomes use to waiting but I have to say, I was quite impressed with the little amount time it took the OWC box to suck it all up. It only took it a total of three minutes. Impressive. Compare that to the LaCie HD Max which took it over ten minutes. Granted, the LaCie is on a USB 2.0 port but when one accounts the speed transfer ratios, the OWC Mercrury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 is still a clear winner. Ripping a 4.31 DVD only took an amazing two minutes! For a more in-depth speed test look, view the results below.
Pros
- Simple to use
- No PC or Mac needed
- Versatile media selection
- Great video quality
Cons
- No auto-stop recording
- No support for Mac OS HFS+ formated drives
The Bottom Line
If you have a ton of video tape that needs to be archived to a digital format to preserve those years of memories and you want to do it easily and quickly, there is no better option than the Pinnacle Video Transfer.
Ratings
Recommended
Yes
Full Review
A few months ago, SvenOnTech was offered to give Pinnacle’s new gadget a try. When we received it, I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical to how well this would work. I grabbed a Sony SLV-MH1F video cassette recorder out of the garage and a Western Digital Passport external hard drive from the drawer and hooked up all the cables to the Pinnacle device. I shoved in The Ten Commandments (please respect all copyright laws…this was just a test) VHS and pressed the record button on the Pinnacle Video Transfer (PVT). I used the Best video setting which Pinnacle states is a resolution of 720×576 (PAL, SECAM) / 480 (NTSC) 1.5 Mbps video and 192 kbps stereo audio 48 KHz for hard drive and flash media. The iPod’s best is 640×480 1.5 Mbps video with 128 kbps stereo audio 48 KHz and the PSP clocking in at 320×240 1 Mbps video and 128 kbps stereo audio 48 KHz.
After a couple of hours, tape one was done and I pressed the record button again to end the recording. A few lights flashed as it completed the recording process and I then had blue lights shortly after. I unplugged the Passport drive from the Pinnacle Video Transfer and plugged it into my Mac. In a newly created folder, VIDEO, lay my new recording. Affectionally titled VID00001.MP4. I double clicked it and up came QuickTime with The Ten Commandments in all its VHS to computer glory. Even though the video tape was from the 80s, the quality was very impressive. The audio was excellent as well. In fact, it was difficult to sense any loss of quality from the transfer at all. I was highly impressed. At a little less than a gig an hour, you will be able to pack a lot of videos onto your drive.
What surprised me must about the PVT was just how easy it was and how good the results were. Taking the supplied composite cables and hooking them up to the OUT on the VCR and into the PVT and then hooking up the USB cable to your hard drive was all it took. Well, that and the power cord. You select your quality and then hit record. It’s that easy. I’ve used many analog-to-digital conversion kits and they always were a pain to use. In fact, I didn’t use them after recording a few tapes to the computer because of the frustration of difficulty related to them. From Dazzle (I had the very first version and then an upgraded one) to gung-hoo video cards from ATI. In the end, it was the software that made them all suck and that doesn’t even account for the system resources it steals from your computer. No computer time for you while recording or start all over when it crashes. The PVT removes all of this burden.