Carrying around an outside hard drive usually means have to remember to tamp the supplement : a data cable television and maybe even a office adaptor . But forget either one , and even the fastest hard drive will be numb in the water . With its permanently attached cable and FireWire heap - powered process , the Aegis Portable grueling drive helps keep thing moving . Now you may focus on more of import things , like remembering to back up your datum on a regular basis .
The Apricorn Aegis Portable features a succinct silver - and - dark plastic enclosure about the size of a wallet . We survey the 80 GB model , but the drive is also available in electrical capacity swan from 40 GB to 160 Great Britain . Apricorn offers a similar model sporting a single tethered USB overseas telegram in the same capacities . The unmarried port wine keeps its sizing down ( it ’s the smallest and lightest thrust we ’ve looked at late ) , in nastiness of the built - in cablegram ’s bulk .
While the 5.5 - in cable may be perfect for function when the driving force is situated next to your MacBook , the effort includes a 39 - inch extender cable television for use when FireWire port are backbreaking to reach . It also comes with a protective case made of stretchable black neoprene . The software megabucks let in tomography and synchronization utilities , Shirt Pocket ’s SuperDuper ( ) and Qdea’sSynchronize X Plus . However , these are the stock versions , which you could download for costless from the WWW .
The drive connects to a FireWire 400 port on your Mac using the tethered cable , which tuck neatly off and snap into a recess channel on the side of the casing when not in use . Although the drive immediately come out on the desktop , it ship formatted for Windows ( FAT32 ) , necessitating a speedy visit to OS X ’s Disk Utility for reformatting during setup .
Overall carrying out was medium , but coherent with that of other portable driving we ’ve recently benchmarked . In the 1 GB file copy test , the Aegis Portable was neck and neck with three other portable drives , commit in the middle rank for both the 1 GB duplicate and Photoshop test .
timed trials
Scale = moment : moment
How We Tested : We ran all tests with the FireWire cause connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.4.8 install and 1 GB of RAM . We tested the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In pillow slip where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we employ FireWire 400 . ) We copied a folder containing 1 GB of information from our Mac ’s laborious driving force to the external hard parkway to test the drive ’s write fastness . We then duplicated that filing cabinet on the external private road to test both understand and write speeds . We also used the drive as a scratch disk when run our low - memory board Adobe Photoshop CS Suite test . This test is a hardening of four project performed on a 150 Bachelor of Medicine file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 25 percent.—Macworld science laboratory Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
If you often think of to carry your portable drive but forget the cable , then this drive is for you . It does n’t put up the tractableness of multiport drives , but you wo n’t miss this feature unless you design on plugging the campaign into a PC , where FireWire port are the elision . While the full interlingual rendition of SuperDuper would have been welcome , the included standard version can create a bootable system of rules clone . Apricorn ’s function of a slower ( 5,400 - rev ) internal mechanism in the drive is a good match for the limited bus power available from laptops . Although this decision has a negatively charged impact on the drive ’s carrying into action , it results in an first-class per - gigabyte toll .
[ Jeffy Milstead is aMacworldLab grad and writer live in San Francisco . ]
