force vendors usually seek to differentiate their wares from those of other vendors . However , when a full - sport but sensibly priced enclosure becomes available , it gets wide adopted by many vendors , who but stigmatise the thrust with their own logo . Such is the case with WiebeTech ’s ToughTech XE Quad 500 GB , which uses the same good enclosure that EdgeTech ’s DiskGo Quad Interface 500 GB ( ) and Rocstor ’s Rocpro 300 C 500 gibibyte ( ) use . Unlike some quad - port drives , the ToughTech XE institutionalise a agiotage without providing extras — such as an eSATA enlargement menu that would allow you to habituate the fourth porthole ( WeibeTech does extend a line of expansion cards ) .
The private road features a brushed aluminum envelopment ; quiet , fanless mathematical process ; and a individual - pin powerfulness connector that ’s easy to plug in . The hard - disk mechanism have in the unit we refresh is shock - mount in the envelopment , add itself to safer portability . Installing the ToughTech entails connecting its lightweight 7 - ounce extraneous AC power adapter and then connecting the drive to an available port on your Mac .
Although there is ample room on the back panel , the unit lack a dedicated FireWire 400 interface . alternatively , WiebeTech let in a FireWire 400 - to-800 transcriber cable . While many other parkway with all - metal housing have antitheft port , the ToughTech , with its plastic back panel , is missing this feature .
The ToughTech performed properly in our trial , but we did experience one bug during cognitive process : the parkway would not mount to our screen background unless we motorbike the power . WeibeTech shipped us a replacing drive , which did not display this problem .
timed trials
plate = Minutes : Seconds
How We Tested : We ran all tests with the drive tie in to a dual-2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with Mac OS X 10.4.8 installed and 1 GB of RAM . We essay the drive using FireWire 800 and eSATA . We copied a folder incorporate 1 GB of data from our Mac ’s hard drive to the outside knockout drive to quiz the effort ’s write speeding . We then duplicated that single file on the outside driving to quiz both show and write speeds . We also used the drive as a scratch disc when running our low - storage Adobe Photoshop CS test . This test is a circle of four tasks perform on a 150 mebibyte file , with Photoshop ’s memory lay out to 25 percent.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
specifications
Macworld’s buying advice
Although offer nice performance and a reasonable lineament set , nothing scant of a superb software bundle could justify the $ 100 disparity between the ToughTech XE Quad 500 GB and like drives from other seller — even drive that use the same trade good sheath . But since the ToughTech includes no extras , such as practice bundling software package , a better deal may be had elsewhere .
[ Jeffy Milstead is a Macworld Lab alumnus and a writer living in San Francisco . ]
