Product Reviews

Formac's Disk Mini is a portable FireWire 400 and USB 2 hard drive based on a 2.5in 5400rpm mechanism. The drive comes in glossy black or white, mirroring the company's Raven and Oxygen desktop hard drives, and is bus powered from either interface. However, in order to draw power from the USB 2 bus, the drive needs to be connected to two USB ports on your Mac by means of the supplied Y cable. This could present a problem if USB slots are in short supply.

The Disk Mini comes in either 60GB, 80GB or 120GB capacities, has a built-in shock absorption suspension system, and if that's not enough protection, there's also a Tucano sleeve included, which will prevent that lovely finish from being scratched.

Plugging

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the drive in to your Mac using either FireWire 400 or USB produces the alert that it needs to be initialised. This is easily done in Disk Utility and the result on our 80GB test drive was a formatted capacity of a little under 74.56GB. There are two status lights on the front of the drive: a red light when the drive is powered up and a green one that flashes when data is being transferred.

The Disk Mini has an 8MB buffer and a quoted seek time of 10ms. Interestingly, although USB 2 and FireWire 400 have similar theoretical maximum speeds, we found in our testing regime that the FireWire interface transferred data more than twice as quickly as the USB 2 interface. However, this, like all portable drives, isn't really about performance. It's more than good enough for backing up data or for transferring documents between computers.

AT £99 and £103 for the white and black 80GB versions respectively, the Formac Disk Mini is well priced for a device that has both FireWire and USB 2 ports. In fact, the inclusion of both interfaces and the bundled Y cable make it among the most versatile portable hard drives we've seen. It may lack the external bumpers of some of LaCie's drives, but the Tucano sleeve and built-in shock absorption mean it's well protected.