Product Reviews

Hard disks are a pretty difficult thing to mod. You can encase them in acoustically absorbent lining, link them into RAID arrays or even water-cool them, but there's not much you can do by yourself to make them look prettier. Western Digital, however, obviously keen to give mass storage the trendy edge it so desperately needs, has produced the Combo Special Edition hard disk - an external drive with lights. Hurrah!

Given that the drive inside the unit is a full-size desktop device and therefore needs desktop amounts of power, there's no chance of powering it via a USB or FireWire port, an advantage of smaller external drives like the TEAC HD-15PUK-20 (see issue 107, p84), so it needs to be plugged into the mains. But power up the Combo and it immediately feels like Christmas. The two red cold-cathode lamps at either side are joined by a couple of bright-blue LEDs: it sounds gaudy, but could almost pass for stylish if you squint.

You can have lots of fun when the drive is spinning by picking it up and wobbling it gently: the gyroscopic effect of the 7,200rpm spindle resisting axial movement will give you endless entertainment.

Just be careful not to drop it. The drive is mounted using pads that will give some semblance of shock protection, but not much. If you want a rugged device, you'd be far better served by the Fortress Rugged 60GB Disk Drive (see issue 108, p80).

The Combo, besides looking like a 1950s jukebox, will be genuinely useful for even the most storage-laden

ADVERTISEMENT

folk. Lurking inside the transparent casing is a fast 250GB Western Digital Caviar Special Edition hard disk, boasting a 7,200rpm spindle speed and an 8MB buffer. Unfortunately, the Combo part of the name doesn't refer to anything exciting like an integrated CD-RW drive or a second hard disk -Êinstead, it refers to the dual USB 2 and FireWire interfaces lurking at the back of the case.

The whole 250GB is preformatted into a single huge FAT32 partition. While this is undoubtedly convenient, the FAT32 file system is an outmoded relic in a Windows XP world. You should reformat it to the far more robust NTFS format straight away, particularly if you're going to be using the drive for backup.

Performance of the Combo is limited more by the external interface than the drive itself, which is actually one of the fastest disks around - the bare Caviar Special Edition drive at the heart of the Combo returned a figure of 45MB/sec running internally over an Ultra ATA/100 interface (see issue 108, p145). If you want maximum performance, the FireWire connection is the one to go for, although it sports FireWire 400 not the newer, faster FireWire 800, which gives it a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 50MB/sec. Running the drive through our standard tests saw it return a 14.3ms average access time, with an average sustained transfer rate of around 28MB/sec over the USB 2 port, increasing slightly to 31MB/sec over FireWire.

In comparison, the LaCie d2 USB 2 & FireWire 800 Hard Drive (see issue 107, p82) produced sustained transfer rates of 42.7MB/sec. But we shouldn't get too bogged down with figures. The Western Digital Combo's performance is still plenty good enough, not only for fast backup but also music recording and video capture and editing.

The bigger problem is that the LaCie drive costs £351 (from www.dabs.com) for the same capacity, so you're paying a £48 premium for the novelty factor of the casing. The LaCie may not catch the eye, but it's still finished in a good-looking brushed aluminium case and is a better choice for value and speed.