Product Reviews

The idea of using rubber to protect the outside of a portable hard drive isn't new; LaCie started shipping drives with a rubber 'bumper' in the late 1990s. However, this Freecom drive is covered in the stuff. In fact, only the rear section of the case where the ports are is rubber-free.

If Freecom designed the white casing of the USB and FireWire version of the ToughDrive Pro so that it would fit with the styling of the iMac and MacBook, it will have been disappointed by the new-look aluminium iMac. However, the drive is really suited to laptop users who need additional storage.

The snag is that even when used with a MacBook or MacBook Pro, the

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ToughDrive Pro is compromised by its FireWire interface. Rather than put a FireWire port on the back and a cable in the box, Freecom decided to hard wire the cable to the drive. The fact that this cable is only a couple of inches long renders it practically useless for hooking up to a desktop Mac; you could hang the ToughDrive Pro off the back of an iMac or Mac Pro, but this is hardly ideal.

Freecom has provided a USB 2 interface alongside the FireWire port, but this too is a compromise, requiring most of us to plug in an external power adaptor.

The ToughDrive Pro ships in three capacities; 120GB, 160GB, and, in what Freecom claims is a first for a portable drive, 250GB; we tested the 160GB version. In Xbench, the ToughDrive Pro managed to read at a sustained 35.8MB/sec and write at 27.1MB/sec when connected by FireWire - reasonable speeds, but nothing more.

At £100 for the 160GB version and £135 for the 250GB model, the ToughDrive Pro is attractively priced, and ships with a copy of the Mac version of NTI Shadow, which may be useful if you don't already have a favoured back-up application.

However, the implementation of the FireWire interface is baffling and would make us think twice before buying.