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Terabyte, that is. I’ve recently purchased two Kaser 500 GB USB 2.0 Storage Vaults. With an average seek time of 9.3 ms and an 8 MB data buffer, they work well with my iBook G4 and a powered USB 2.0 hub.
Interestingly, these two drives have a PS/2-style power adaptor that allows it to be connected directly to a tower’s PS/2 port for power. This doesn’t work on an Apple laptop or iMac, though, since PS/2 ports were phased out years ago.
I have only two criticisms of these devices: the supplied adaptor’s power wire, which connects to the AC/DC converter, is far too short at less than 2 feet. I can’t, for example, leave the converter on the floor and my drive on my desk (or standard two-drawer filing cabinet) because the converter hangs in mid air! This means that the converter has to take up desk space, totally negating their clever and stylish vertical mounting holder.
Second, the only disk access light is at the back, so if you’re the type of person who likes to see it, you’re out of luck.
Otherwise these devices have handled very well under the moderate to high strain I’ve put them under.
I’ve also been considering concatenating these two drives into a RAID striped array. I’ve already done so with two SanDisk Cruzer 2.0 GB flash drives and it seems to be working very well (in MacOS X 10.4.9). Of course, I’m running into a data throughput bottleneck at my hub, since I currently have (including my iPod) 6 drives connected to it.
13 September 2007 at 17:05
I’m a little curious how the Kaser 500’s are holding up. I can’t seem to find anybody with an educated response that’s reviewed, or even spoken about one.
BestBuy has the 500 and 250gb models on sale right now (at least here in Winnipeg) and they’re looking pretty tempting.
Any failures? Data loss, lockups etc?
On a seperate note, raid striping external drives works wonderfully! I recently took that a step further by plunking down two dedicated 100mbit network lines to a fileserver in my house, and exporting two iscsi volumes, which were then mounted and striped via windows xp’s internal striping support. The result, a reasonably fast networked volume. Of course my solution results in three network cards in each machine, so gigabit will be the future course, but this was an interesting experiment.
13 September 2007 at 21:09
Richard, I’ve had no problems at all with the drives themselves, and I use them both daily. That’s an educated response: no issues to report :)
I have had some issues mounting them, but I have, from the outset, suspected my Dynex USB hub and not the drives.
Thanks for your mention of external RAID, too!
7 January 2008 at 14:02
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