With Serial ATA ( SATA ) hard disks now being used exclusively inside the total Mac product line , it was only a matter of time before an external 2.5 - inch SATA ride was offer in a FireWire natural enclosure for utilization alongside the Mac . The miniXpress 825 portable FireWire hard thrust brings the benefits of the quick SATA interface to portable storage , and it is priced competitively when compared to other triple - user interface portable drives with similar carrying out . Just do n’t require any spear carrier in the form of backup software , which is unremarkably bundled with drive .
The miniXpress 825 160 GB is housed in a small , attractive aluminium case with an anodized last . Although we tested the 160 GB , 5,400 - revolutions per minute configuration , this enclosure is also available with either a 100 GB 7,200 - rpm or 120 GB 5,400 - rev effort installed .
Setting up the crusade was easy . just cable your Mac to the drive using one of the two uncommitted FireWire 800 ports or the lone FireWire 400 port , and the parkway quietly powers up and appear on the Mac background . connect via the USB 2.0 port involve using the provide external power adaptor .
While the included wall - mount power adapter is o.k. for plugging straight into a wall outlet , its bulk will crowd out neighboring exit when used in a multi - outlet strip . This complaint is small-scale , considering that the only time you will apply the power adapter is during USB operation or when connecting the drive to older PowerBooks that ca n’t furnish enough king through the USB cable .
The miniXpress 825 make out well in Macworld ’s stock test retinue . In one test , it beat out all other portable drive we ’ve looked at latterly , including some fit with a debauched 7,200 - rev chemical mechanism . In another trial , the miniXpress drive was only 9 percentage tedious than the two fast performers , the pricier LaCie Rugged All Terrain and the LaCie Little Big Disk ( ) .
timed trials
ordered series = Minutes : Seconds
How We Tested : We go all tests with the FireWire drives connected to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.3.9 establish and 512 MB of random memory . We try the drive using FireWire 800 . ( In cases where a drive does not have FireWire 800 , we use FireWire 400 . ) We copy a folder curb 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard parkway to the extraneous operose movement to test the driving force ’s write speed . We then parallel that file cabinet on the external drive to screen both read and write speeds . We also used the drive as a scratch magnetic disk when carry our low - store Adobe Photoshop CS Suite trial . This trial is a set of four labor performed on a 150 megabit file , with Photoshop ’s memory set to 50 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
If you ’re looking for a sleek and speedy drive for toting your files from home to part , the miniXpress 825 160 GB hard private road is an admirable performer among 5,400 - rpm portables . The driving force is a good choice and offer first-class note value — provided you pretermit the lack of USB bus power operation and the way out - gobbling wall - mounted power supply . Its favorable cost - per - gigabyte proportion might be attribute in part to the absence seizure of backup package , which ship with most other drive we ’ve try out . But , we do n’t consider this a serious drawback .
[ Jeffy Milstead is a Macworld Lab alumnus and author living in San Francisco . ]
