Tag: LaCie

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Review: OWC Mercury On-The-Go SSD External Drives

Yes I'm a speed freak. I spent much of the money I made as a youth paying for speeding tickets. This means I also like my computers to go as fast as possible. I moved to SSD (solid state drive) drives with my latest notebooks and while the cost is high, I do like the boot times, application launch times and of course the data copy times (see my original boot time comparison video here). Speaking of data copy this made me think about the drives that I'm copying that data to and from. While it's great having a fast internal drive, I started to look at the external drives I carry around too. This is when I decided to test the OWC Mercury On-The-Go SSD External Portable Drives. The good folks over at OWC sent me a review unit (a 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro). The first thing I wanted to test was copy speeds. The drive comes with a 1.73GB disk image of shareware on it. I figured I'd start my test copying this file back and forth and between drives. 

 

Copy Times (shorter is better)

To copy 1.73GB disc image from the OTG 240GB SSD Drive

To copy 1.73GB disc image to the OTG 240GB SSD Drive

 

To copy 1.73GB disc image from the LaCie

 

To copy 1.73GB disc image to the LaCie

 

 

Next up a folder of RAW photos

To copy 3.87GB folder of photos from the OTG 240GB SSD Drive

 

To copy 3.87GB folder of photos to the OTG 240GB SSD Drive

 

To copy 3.87GB folder of photos from the LaCie Drive

To copy 3.87GB folder of photos to the LaCie Drive

The OWC SSD drive won in every test and I imagine with larger copies such as backups and clones the time savings would be realized even more.

 

 

A Startling Realization – Firewire 800 is not fast enough

After doing just a couple of tests with the new SSD drive and my existing LaCie Rugged Drive I realized that while the OWC SSD drive was faster (see the numbers above), it wasn't night and day faster. I have a theory that the bottleneck is the Firewire 800 bus itself. In other words the data can only go as fast as Firewire 800 will transfer it. 

 

The Bottom Line

The OWC Mercury On-The-Go with an Extreme Pro SSD drive is Fast, Silent and Portable! It's also likely to be more reliable as there are no moving parts to fail like in traditional hard drives. SSD drives can slow down over time and that has yet to be seen with this model as I haven't had it long enough to know if that will happen or not. The one thing that isn't an advantage right now is speed over traditional drives with FW800. With that said they do offer a USB 3.0 version that will likely yield faster results over FW800 if you happen to have a USB 3.0 equipped computer. However, until we see Thunderbolt based portable drives I don't think we'll see the real speed potential of these SSD drives. With that said, you'd have to weigh the cost of going SSD vs. traditional hard drives for your portable data needs. Having a drive with no moving parts/peace of mind comes at a premium price.

The OWC Mercury On-The-Go 240GB SSD goes for $479.99

Their 320GB 7200 RPM Drive in the same case goes for $104.99.

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LaCie Rugged goes 1TB

It still amazes me when I think about the fact that we've reached a point where we can carry around 1TB drives in our pockets. I typically carry an external drive or two in my laptop bag for carrying extra files, Windows 7 Images for Parallels, bootable backups and to backup my shots after my shoots before I leave the studio. Until the 1TB 2.5" drives came out this meant carrying two or three drives to accomplish this. Now I can carry one! I got the LaCie Rugged 1TB to put to the test. I wanted one drive that I could partition into three partitions and of course I wanted one that was bus powered over Firewire 800 (and USB when needed).

The LaCie Rugged meets those requirements. It has a triple interface with Firewire 800, 400 and USB 2 ports on back. Although it's bus powered, they even supply a USB to power cable for those situations when your single USB port isn't providing enough power, you can plug this cable into a second USB port to power the drive. They also provide FireWire 800, 400 and USB 2 cables.
Although the bright orange color stands out (you'll have no problem seeing it in your bag or maybe even a dark room), I ordered the optional 3 pack of sleeves to change the color of the drive.

You get black, silver and purple in the sleeve pack. Even the purple/blue is a little more subdued than the orange.
 

So far so good

In my short time of using this drive it seems fast (5400 rpm speeds) and quiet. I had no problems cloning my boot drive to one of the partitions that I made and loading up the other two partitions with the files I need to carry. Also they call this drive "rugged" for a reason. It's meant to be traveled with. It has a rubber outer case (the sleeves) and it's one of the only drives I've ever seen that advertises a maximum "drop distance" although they clearly state that you should avoid dropping it while it's running (duh!).

 

Maximum Drop Height :  up to 2.2 meters in non-operating mode (dropping is not recommended in operating mode)

While this is not the first LaCie Rugged drive I've purchased (I got my daughter one for her Time Machine backups when she went off to college), it's the first one that I've gotten for me.

You can get the 1TB LaCie Rugged here for $199

You can get the 3 optional sleeves in Black, Grey, Purple here for about $17