Product Reviews

External hard disk-based backup devices aren't exactly a new concept but, as the first external Serial ATA device to come our way, the Velocity Drive is a little different.

External hard disks have previously been based on either a USB 2 or FireWire (or, in the old days, SCSI) interface rather than EIDE because of limits on cable length. But SATA cures this with a maximum length of 1m, so SATA external drives can attach directly to a motherboard SATA socket via a PCI backplane passthrough adaptor.

The Velocity arrives housed in a smaller case than most external drives. The back panel features a tiny cooling fan, on/off switch, power connector and that's it. The drive - a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, the fastest drive overall in our last hard disks Labs (see issue 108, p149) - is directly connected to the SATA port,

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so no intervening electronics are necessary.

The Velocity comes with BounceBack Professional software, which has all the features you'd expect, including the ability to fully image the source drive, turning the Velocity into a bootable image of the source. After a full backup, BounceBack Professional supports synchronisation, versioning and background backups, but these aren't allowed when backing up a root drive: for this, you need to sit through the full process each time. It's also worrying that backed-up files just sit on the Velocity Drive and aren't locked or read-only; a simple virus designed to erase all files from all writable drives would also wipe the Velocity. In short, BounceBack Professional is fine for the single user, but it's by no means an industrial-strength application.

A full backup of 15GB of files from a Western Digital parallel ATA drive, including file verification, took just under 25 minutes; this is approximately halved without verification. With the speed of the SATA interface and the drive inside the Velocity, however, the limiting factor in backup time is likely to be the source drive, especially if you're blase enough not to bother with verification.

Given that a bare 200GB DiamondMax Plus 9 drive costs around £110, you're paying quite a bit for an external case and some backup software. This makes it hard to recommend the Velocity, but it does perform well.