We tried plugging both USB connectors into a variety of our desktop machines and found that only about 25% of them provided enough power for the drive to run reliably. On those machines where the drive didn't get enough juice, we observed a variety of fatal (and very disturbing) behaviors. On one machine, the drive simply crashed, and we found we were unable to get to the drive's data until we did a disk scan and repair. On another machine, the entire box died very hard, and we wound up having to repair our Windows XP installation.

Here's where Seagate's marketing folks blew it with this product. It's not that the drive draws too much power for many USB connectors to meet the demand. It's that the power brick that could power the drive is not included in the package. If your drive crashes or you have problems, we're told, you can call Seagate, and only then will they send out the power brick that's necessary to make the drive work.

This was a cost-saving strategy on the part of some short-sighted product manager and is inexcusable. If you're in the business of making hard drives, data integrity needs to be at the top of your list. Selling a drive knowing it might fail, and then, if it does, then sending the power brick to the buyer -- all to save two bucks off the product's cost of goods, is a bad move and is very disrespectful of customers' data, time, and stress levels.

Had the power brick been included, this product would have gotten a four-star rating. But since the company clearly didn't care enough about the reliability of its customers' data to include a two buck part, we're forced to drop the rating of this drive to a 2 out of 5. Sadly, we cannot recommend you buy what would otherwise have been a perfectly good, sweet little drive.

OUR RATING: 2 of 5

Kano SureFIRE 800 60GB
Unlike Seagate, the folks at Kano Technologies did not choose to cheap out on their product. Kano sent us their SureFIRE 800 60GB external portable hard drive, shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


This is a fast drive. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The SureFIRE 800 supports FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0, making it compatible with most Windows and Mac systems. Now, this is a drive we would have reviewed far earlier than when we're publishing this article. We gave it to a Macintosh enthusiast who promised to write us a detailed review. Months and months went by. No review.

After contacting our buddy a few times, we finally figured out what the problem was. He figured that if he wrote the review, he'd have to give back the drive. But if he kept on procrastinating, he'd be able to keep the drive longer. That ought to give you an idea about how good the drive is.

After we finally extracted the drive from our "reviewer's" hands, we finally got to test it here. And we could see why he liked it so much. The fact that it works well with both FireWire 400 and 800, and with USB 2.0 makes it a very versatile device. The only issue is the price. At over $200, the price per megabyte is considerable.

But, if you want the versatility of virtually any interface and capacities up to 100GB, we can strongly recommend the Kano SureFIRE, which fires off a 4 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5