Fast and Powerful - Other World Computing's New Hard Drives Pahrump NV

Posted by : Ken Henningsen

Other World Computing is a supplier of innovative peripherals, catering primarily to the Mac community. Among their many offerings is a broad range of internal, external, and removable hard drives, running the gamut from IDE to UltraSCSI, in sizes up to 200GB. The company recently introduced two lines of external hard drives aimed at heavy consumers of gigabytes like digital videographers; I tested two. Both drives come with Intech SpeedTools 3.5, a Mac-only driver/utility suite that OWC claims boosts speeds by 9 percent over stock (pre-Mac OS X) Apple drivers. SpeedTools doesn't work under OS X, but both drives mounted fine with no additional drivers and were available to Apple's Disk Utility.

First up was a 60 GB OWC Mercury On-The-Go ($380), a FireWire drive whose small size belies its large performance. Other models are available from 20GB to 60GB (now including FireWire/USB 2.0 versions), priced from $176 to $400. Not much bigger than a deck of cards, the On-The-Go is housed in clear acrylic, weighs only 11 ounces, and comes with a leather carrying case that holds both the drive and the included 16-inch FireWire cable. As is plainly visible from the outside, it uses a 2.5-inch IBM 5,400 RPM TravelStar laptop mechanism. The On-The-Go operates very quietly from either AC--with an included wall wart--or FireWire bus power. A three-position slider switches between off and either power source.

Performance of any hard drive is hig...

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