Macopinion

Last Minute Christmas Gift Suggestion: External Hard Drive For Leopard Time Machine Backups

If you're a The Road Warrior reader, you probably own and use a PowerBook, iBook, or one of the MacIntel MacBook family, and in all likelihood you probably know other Apple 'Book users, some of whom may be on your Christmas gift list, or perhaps you'll be dropping some hints to significant others who will be buying you a Christmas gift.

Christmas is just a week away, but if you're like me, you haven't finished your Christmas shopping yet. It's (more than) a bit late to be ordering items that will have to be shipped from online vendors, but downloadable software is still an option, and you're local brick & mortar tech product resellers will be happy to oblige right up to next Monday.

With the cool, new Time Machine automatic backup feature in OS X 10.5 Leopard, anyone who has upgraded to the new system will want to have an external hard drive in order to take advantage, and in most areas, you should be able to find one at a local reseller in plenty of time for Christmas.

I was skeptical about Time Machine, when it was first announced as a Leopard banner feature enhancement, but I've quickly become a convert. Time Machine is slick. Basically, you just connect an external hard drive and let it do its stuff with no fuss or bother. It's the slickest backup software I've ever used by a wide margin.

There is a vast selection of external hard drives available, both with USB 2 interfaces, or sometimes for a bit more money, FireWire connectivity, or, the best of both worlds - ambidextrous support of both USB 2 and FireWire, the latter having the advantages of being faster in my experience in real-world terms (notwithstanding USB 2's nominal higher 480 Mb/sec transfer speeds claim, compared with standard FireWire's 400 Mb/sec ), and more importantly - bootable. I recommend FireWire if your budget will stand it.

I have an older FireWire External Drive and a couple of USB 2 units. Two of these contain relatively small-capacity hard drives pulled from 'Books that have been upgraded, but the third is a very swish SimpleTech SimpleDrive styled by the illustrious Italian design firm, Pininfarina, which has created the delectable shapes of Ferrari automobiles since the 1950s.

My Pininfarina SimpleDrive is a 3.5", 7200 RPM, 500 GB USB 2 unit, but these drives are optionally available with a second, FireWire interface. USB 2 is more than adequate for using with Leopard Time Machine, however, and since my PowerBook's hard drive is only 80 GB and far from being bung-full, I'm laughing with excess capacity.

However, the SimpleTech Pininfarina drive is available in several capacities and a variety of colors, with each respective color indicating the capacity of the drive, to wit: Pearl White (250GB), Sapphire (320GB), Onyx (500GB) and Charcoal Gray (750GB and 1TB).

My 500 MB unit is thus Onyx, or Jet Black with an extremely high gloss finish, which looks terrific, and I much prefer gloss to the matte black finish of the MacBook. It does show dust and fingerprints, but it's a pleasure to keep this baby polished.

In profile, the SimpleDrive brings to mind the wedge-shape of contemporary sports-racing cars, not that it's a scaled-down caricature of an automobile, but an original piece of design art in its own right, but its thematic automotive lineage is unmistakable, with classic Ferrari-esque touches like the boldly scalloped louvers on either side of its wedge-shaped nose, which date back to at least Pininfarina's legendary Ferrari 250 GTO of 1962-'63.

On top of the drive housing is an oval-shaped "Capacity Meter," - an LED ring in a cool blue, with four sectors respectively representing one quarter of the drive's storage capacity. For example, if one out of the four sectors is lit, your drive is a quarter full, and so forth. When SimpleDrive is powered up, the Capacity Meter illuminates to provide visual indication of the amount of available storage left on the drive. When available storage space falls below 10 percent, the capacity meter flashes red for 10 seconds, and then goes off.

The center of the Capacity Meter oval is actually a oversized "One-Click Button" which you can press to launch a "total media backup" of the files on your computer to the external drive using the bundled ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup software, which is incredibly slow and clunky compared with Time Machine, so if you're running Leopard, don't even bother to install TotalMediaBackup. However, if you're still using Tiger, Panther, or even Jaguar, the One-Click Backup support software that comes pre-installed on the drive can be used to schedule manual, custom, daily, weekly, or monthly backups.

Having 500 GB or more capacity in your backup drive is great, but if your budget is a bit constrained (and whose isn't at this time of year?) the 250 GB model has plenty of Time Machine capacity for many users. Currently, Best Buy here in Nova Scotia is advertising the USB 2 version of the 250 GB Pininfarina SimpleDrive for CAN$89.99, which isn't too hard to take and the best price I've seen for one of these drives, and I expect it would be at least as cheap or even cheaper at Best Buy stores in the U.S.

For North American retail sources for SimpleTech drives, click here.
http://www.simpletech.com/webspeed/wtb/index.php?display=1&country=USA®ion=title_na.jpg

> The full-sized 3.5" 7,200 RPM Pininfarina SimpleDrive is a feast for the eyes, and offers excellent performance, but it is a bit big and bulky for packing around in a laptop case or backpack. This should not be a problem for use at tour home or office workstation, but for serious Road Warriors, SimpleTech offers the same gorgeous Pininfarina styling styling in the SimpleDrive Portable, a smaller package (about the size of a 1/32 scale model car) that is lighter (.26 pounds as opposed to 2 pounds for the full-sized drive) and smaller to carry on the road, but ruggedized for travel in USB 2.0 only with notebook-type 2.5" 5400 RPM drive modules with 8Mb buffer (cache) maxing out at 250 GB capacity rather than the full-size 3.5" 7200 RPM units used in the Desktop High-Speed SimpleTech models. Not that 5400 RPM is any slouch.

It's also probably quieter than the 7,200 RPM unit in the 3.5" drives. SimpleTech describes the SimpleDrive as "designed for quiet operation., but it whines like a turbine spooling up and then settles down to a more subdued but still very audible hum. Happily, the drive automatically spins down if there is no drive access for 10 minutes or so.

In summary, however, I'm really pleased with this drive in general. It looks great, performs well, and makes a perfect support companion for Time Machine.

System Requirements
• PowerPC G4 400 MHz (recommended)
• Mac OS X (10.2.8, 10.3 or 10.4) operating system
• 100 MB free hard disk space
• 256 MB RAM recommended
• Available USB 2.0/1.1 port or (SimpleDrive Deluxe) FireWire 400 port

Specifications - SimpleTech Pininfarina SimpleDrive Desktop
Hard Drive 3.5 inch, 7200 RPM
Capacity: 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1 TB available
Cache Buffer 8MB (minimum)
Seek Time Less than 10 mSec
Transfer Rate Up to 34 MB/sec
Interface USB 2.0 compliant, 1.1 compatible; FireWire 400, 1394b compliant, 1394a compatible)
Interface Transfer Rate USB 2.0: Up to 480 MB/sec; FireWire 400: Up to 400 MB/sec (SimpleDrive Deluxe only)
Power External AC power adapter; 100/220V, 50/60 Hz AC input, 1.5 Vdc output
Operating Temperature 41° to 95° F (5° to 35° C)
Operating Humidity 5 - 95%, RH non-condensing
Compatibility Windows and Mac users (preformatted for Windows) - Windows 2000, XP, Vista,
MacOSX
Dimensions 8.2 in. x 5.1 in. x 1.5 in. (209 mm x 130 mm x 40 mm)
Weight 2.0 lbs. (0.91kg)

Specifications - SimpleTech Pininfarina SimpleDrive Portable:
Slim, compact & stylish (designed by Pininfarina)
Capacity: 250GB, 160GB, 120GB, and 80GB available
Ruggedized for travel
Hi-Speed USB 2.0
Form Factor: 2.5 inches
Rotational Speed: 5400 RPMs
Buffer Size: 8192 KB
Height: .63 inches
Width: 3 inches
Depth: 5 inches
Weight: .26 lbs
One-Click backup software (Windows only)
No external power required
Plug n' Play and Hot-Swappable
Free and unlimited technical support
3-Year warranty

For more information, visit:
http://www.simpletech.com/products/storage/



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cmoore@macopinion.com


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