Cavalry Storage CACE Series 400 GB USB / Firewire 800 Mac-Ready External Hard Drive CACE37400

The drive arrived...and was defective. It constantly disconnected and re-connected itself...randomly. I'd be in the middle of trying to send a file to the drive and a message would pop up saying the drive had been improperly disconnected and data might have been damaged/lost. It certainly wasn't me who disconnected the drive - the drive disconnected itself. Or - while simply surfing the internet, not even trying to use the drive, I'd get the same error message popping up...suddenly: the drive has been disconnected improperly. Then, all on its own, again, the drive would re-connect itself. On and off, shorting in and out; a horrible glitch...making the drive completely unreliable/unuseable. I called the manufacturer for tech support. They wouldn't talk to me on the phone, insisting that I email tech support - which I instantly did. I emailed them 3 times over 3 days and got nothing in response...by phone or email. Finally - tech support did call me...only to say what I already knew:...Read more

I learned pretty quickly why this drive had such a low price. It is because it doesn't work.

I have an iMac. I plugged this in with firewire and the drive immediately appeared and I was able to copy files to and from it. That lasted 10-15 minutes. After that the Mac Finder stopped responding and I had to turn off this hard drive to get it to snap out of it. Several similar attempts later, I turned it off and left it off.

A couple days later, I thought I'd give it a try using USB instead. This time it seemed to be working fine and gave no problems working with it for over an hour. It continued to be fine for several days (I only used it sporadically), but one day the Finder froze up again and once again I had to turn off this hard drive to get it to wake up. It has since worked fine on USB (about a week) without another lockup.

I don't feel at this point that this drive can be trusted at all. As a firewire drive, it is completely...Read more

THE GOOD:
Solid case. It includes a particularly quiet, green (i.e. energy-efficient) hard drive and power supply in a high quality case, firewire 800 and USB cables, and a nice blue LED light, and on/off switch. 2 firewire 800 ports (for daisy-chaining). Note, it does come with a 800-800 cable NOT a 800-400 cable, contrary to the picture on the manufacturer's website, but this is arguably a good thing.

THE BAD:
1) This product was oversold. 2)It keeps making my Mac hang.

1[...]The spec page</a> claims "Sustained data transfer rates up to 100MB/sec".
I didn't get very close to that. EVER. I got an otherwise very respectable 69 MB/sec. But that spec led me to believe they were shipping it with one of the faster 1TB HDs, rather than the slowest one available.

I bought the drive specifically to use with my MacBook Pro at firewire
800 speed, namely the "Sustained data transfer rates up to 100MB/sec"
advertised...Read more