Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Looks ace |
| Disadvantages: |
Large PSU, Noisy |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
Overview
This device just looks great; every geek desk should be littered with oversized Lego bricks, but the premium price tag, loud disk drive and large power supply are enough to put off all but the hardened geeks better half.
The Looks
Pure Geek love, the shiny red plastic with its six large Lego dimples would take a prime location on any ones desk. Its front face has just a single red light glowing under the shiny plastic. The sides are plain shiny red plastic but with obnoxious grills at the rear, barely noticeable when the device is facing you but stick out when it is sideward. The back has USB & power in and a power button.
The Power Block
The external power supply is almost half the size as the device. Sure, it lives under your desk where none sees it, but the thing is huge and heats up. Great for putting you feet on during a cold winter night, not so good for the rest of the year.
Whirl
It is quite loud, almost as loud as my Laptop, which is quite some feat as my laptop is a large desktop replacement nick-named “airhock” as if you turn it over; the fans would easily let it double as an airhocky board. I’ve got use to the constant whirling of my laptop but if you want silent nights this is not for you.
The
SpeedIt does feel a fair bit slower than my internal SCSI hard disk. So I did some basic testing by writing some files to them both. In simple terms writing a small file to the internal hard disk was twice as fast as writing to the brick(*1). Writing large files in small chunks was equal (*2). Finally writing large files in large chunks put the internal
drive slightly ahead, but slightly (*3).
The Wiring
The shipped USB cable is a little too short, and limits where the device can go. It is also USB only, which is a shame as personally I’m running out of USB slots. The laptop version has a Firewire edition, but that is only 120GB.
The Size
The device is 500G (465 usable when formatted as NTFS). This is more than enough space for most people. Given a large game would take up about 10G (2) it will fit 46 large games. Or you could look at it as about 27 television series in HD quality. Either way it is more than big enough for some time yet.
Stacking
While not compatible with either Lego or Duplo they are compatible with each other, and with the smaller (2 by 2-block rather than 2 by 3-block) laptop versions. Alas this does not mean they will share a single power supply, or do some cool automatic RAID array. Two power supplies under the desk are two to many. Also the colour is defined by the size (red is 500 and 250, white is 160 and blue is 320) so having a funky looking stack would mean requiring a large amount of USB ports, power sockets and a mix of drive sizes. Not at all ideal.
Installation
Like all modern USB hard disk drives it is plug & play. Virtually installation free.
Cost
It was about 10 more expensive than “none-designer” external hard disks when I bought it from a small shop in Tottenham Court Road. It was also about 10 cheaper than other “designer” external hard disks.
Do I Recommend It?
Off course I do, it is an oversized Lego brick, and thus the essences of geek-cool.
Geek Time
I though I’d show what test I did run so fellow geeks could pull them apart, and tell me how I should have done them. Both drives have been scandisked and defragged prior to running these tests. All other applications were closed. Any suggestions please leave a comment, and I will run the updated versions, and update the review.
- 1) dd count=1 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/cygdrive/X/test.zero
Returning 32MB/s and 70MB/s.
- 2) dd count=1000 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/cygdrive/X/test.zero
Returning 23MB/s each.
- 3) dd count=1 bs=1G if=/dev/zero of=/cygdrive/X/test.zero
Returning 22MB/s and 25MB/s.
2) Microsoft Flight Simulator is 13GB and Supreme Commander is 8GB.
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
