Freecom's Hard Drive Pro is the only 1TB hard disk on test. It lacks eSATA, but it does provide FireWire 400 and 800 as well as USB Hi-Speed.
The Pro's performance over FireWire was excellent. Over FireWire 800, it was just behind LaCie's d2 when copying small and large files. Its performance over FireWire 400 was the best in the group in our large-file copy tests, at 32.68MB/s, but it was in third place for copying small files, with an average of 15.3MB/s. When connected via USB its large- and small-file performance was only average for the group.
The disk has two front-mounted buttons, one for launching the included NTI Shadow backup program and the other for password-protecting your disk. You can't use your own software with either button, though.
The Pro is a huge drive with good FireWire performance, but it's expensive at 29p per gigabyte. We'd rather buy two 500GB Buffalo DriveStation Combo drives for less.
By Alan Lu
SPECIFICATIONS:
1TB capacity, USB Hi-Speed, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 interfaces
