It has been an exciting weekend, as our son had his first club football game, a convincing win for his team (30 to 8) against opponents who punched, pinched and played dirty. We took a lot of photographs … more than 400, to be precise. Now, how to get the good ones over to the team mom?
It has been an exciting weekend, as our son had his first club football game, a convincing win for his team (30 to 8) against opponents who punched, pinched and played dirty. We took a lot of photographs … more than 400, to be precise.
Now, how to get the good ones over to the team mom? The problem is she uses Adelphia cable, which has a 10M-byte message size limit, and we have about 1G byte of photos to send. This is a good chance to try out some new portable storage devices we’ve been meaning to take a look at.
First, we have the ENC-302U PC Drive Kit from Azio. This kit allows you to build an external 3.5-inch drive with a USB 2.0 interface that will automatically be recognized by Windows XP, Win 2000 and Mac OS X. Azio provides drivers for Win 98 and Win SE.
The kit consists of an attractively designed, stackable enclosure (8.25 by 5 by 1.5 inches) containing electronics, connectors and a power supply into which you install your own UDMA 33/66- or ATA-100/133-compliant drive. One hopes a future version will support Serial ATA drives.
If you can use a screwdriver, you can install a drive into the PC Drive Kit. The accompanying instructions aren’t too clever, but if you have a clue about what you’re doing, they will be enough.
But we have two complaints: First, the data cables are a little too crowded between the drive and the electronics, which makes locating the drive a “grind to fit” exercise. Second, because the cables are squashed, you will be inclined, quite sensibly, to relieve them by placing the drive as far away from the electronics as possible. You will then secure the drive with screws.
Unfortunately, at this location, the drive will interfere with the top of the enclosure, so you will have to undo the screws and push the drive back toward the electronics, thereby squashing the cables to get enough clearance. A simple plastic lug to limit the position of the drive and a better cable path would have solved this.
Is the Azio ENC-302U Kit worth it? Well, if you were to buy a complete external 80G-byte drive with a USB 2.0 interface, you would expect to spend about $100. Using the Azio PC Drive Kit, which costs $44, and buying an 80G-byte drive works out to roughly the same price – but if you happen to have an old drive lying around, then the kit becomes a really good value. We used an old 80G-byte Maxtor drive and it worked fine.
Our second storage device is the Dragon Drive 2.5 from US Modular. The Dragon Drive comes complete with a drive installed (available capacities are 20G, 40G, 60G, 80G and 100G bytes) and ready to rumble.
The Dragon Drives use 2.5-inch drives, so the enclosures are smaller (6.35 by 3.57 by 0.67 inches) than the Azio enclosures, provide USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces, and can be powered by an included 5-volt adapter (aka a wall wart) or by the port they connect to. The drives also come with a neat carrying wallet that stores the bundled adapter cable and the disk with Win 98 and Win SE drivers.
The USB 2.0 interface is specified as running at 480M bit/sec, and Firewire is rated at 400M bit/sec, so you might think that external drives with USB 2.0 interfaces would be the better choice. Real-world testing shows Firewire is 16% to 48% faster on writes and 33% to 70% faster on reads. It will come as no surprise that the Dragon Drive is a faster storage solution than the USB 2.0 Azio drive.
Best of all, the higher speed and smaller form factor come without higher cost: The 80G-byte Dragon Drive is available for about $100.
We like this product a lot, so we’ll be off to load up the team mom’s machine with the Dragon Drive.
Send your team shots to gearhead@gibbs.com. As always, check Gearblog.
