It was hard to tell what would break and what would give. It was not terribly easy to get apart initially. So, despite it costing nearly $900 with tax, we peeled off the label and went to work. But with this device, it was a big hassle to test the RAID. Some of them, like the cheap motherboard built in SATA raids can take a while to rebuild and verify the drive that got out of sync, others are smarter (I've been very happy with the cheap PCI IDE Adaptect 1200A RAID cards and satisfied with the monsterous Adaptec 8-drive IDE raid card). We decided to try to open it up and yank the power on one of the drives and see if : 1) the device complained in an obvious way to let us know that something was wrong and 2) the device continued to work with only one of the two drives functional.Įvery other RAID-1/5 we've had, we have done failure testing on to verify things work OK. I understand that this is a consumer level device and isn't built to be user-servicable, but this is also a RAID-1 device where the whole point of that type of machine is to protect my data. It is actually a little offensive that they put the sticker on there. If something like this went bad, we would open it up to try to fix it immediately, we're not going to put it in the mail and hope it comes back all worky with our data intact. If the brain in the RAID goes bad, at least I've still got the drives.
I'm not likely to send the unit with the drives in it off to get repaired if the drives go bad. I don't want the unit replaced if it goes bad: I want my data back. However, who the fuck cares about a warranty? I care about my data, period. On the back of the unit, there's a little tamper-evident sticker over one of the screws on the case saying that opening the case voids the warranty. After we got it set up and running (pretty easy and quick), it became obvious that there was no way to verify that there was any RAID going on. It runs pretty quiet, but there is a soft fan noise that is audible.Ī couple of the reviews of this very new item complained that there was no way to verify that the RAID-1 was actually working. The unit is very compact, just a little bigger than two small firewire enclosures jammed together.
The drive came preformatted for OSX and the manual has its OSX instructions first. The first thing of note about these drives is that they are first multi-platform (not mac-specific) piece of hardware I've ever seen that prioritized OSX. Further, we'd heard nasty things about the reliability of some maxtor 300GB drives, but we weren't sure if the drives in these units would be the same family (IDE vs SATA). It was just more than we needed at the moment by a couple hundred gig and thus a couple hundred dollars. The 1000GB (2x500GB) version was kind of expensive ($830 USD), but not ridiculously so per GB. After some agonizing, we ended up buying the 1000GB version with RAID-1 because the main point is that we need data safety. We purchased the wrong one, got it home, plugged it in, verified it was the wrong one and returned it. It turns out the 600GB version comes in two flavors, distinct between the packaging in just a couple of words, with one flavor only doing RAID 0, the other doing both RAID 0 and RAID 1. The reader is warned: buy this product at your own risk.So we made the decision to buy the 600GB version of this first and didn't read the packaging really closely at Fry's. This reviewer will not be buying any further Maxtor products. A one year lifespan is unacceptable for a product of this capacity and intended role. If Maxtor would put some effort into quality control, they would have a good product.
Overall Review: During the year I owned and used this drive, I really enjoyed it. Not just "hey, this thing is kind of warm," but so hot that I couldn't hold the thing for more than 10 seconds. Repackaging to return the unit to point of sale, I also observed that the power adapter "brick" was hot to the touch. I purchased this unit just shy of one year ago and used it as a backup drive for my thesis, and it died just recently amid a flurry of write errors.Īll that was left was a unit that made rapid clicking noises. The ID language of the unit suggests strength and durability.Ĭons: The ID language is the only aspect of this product that is strong and durable. Firewire and USB interfaces are nice to have. Pros: Loads of space to store digital content, raw data, and anything else you could want.