At the heart of this device is a Hitachi HTS723232L9A360 320GB 7200RPM 2.5" HDD with a 16MB cache. The enclosure casing is clear plastic with a metallic panel on the bottom (heat sink?) and rubber feet. It feels sturdy and well made, and offers a look at the innards of the device. The LEDs on the front of the drive for power and activity can be a little bright if you have to face them all day, but the small size of the drive allows you to tuck it away virtually anywhere.
While it works fine off USB bus power, the included AC adapter is required in the following cases: using eSATA connection, large capacity and/or higher RPM drive (must mean above 7200RPM), or if connecting to FireWire using a 4-pin cable as this type of connection doesn't provide bus power. I imagine most users will be going with USB connectivity, so as long as the port provides power, you can use it anywhere, any time.
There's a lot stacked in its favor so far, so lets look at how the drive actually performs. When you first attach it to your machine, the only things on the drive are the trash folder (Apple), recycler folder (Windows), and the System Volume Information folder (Windows). My PC picked up the drive as soon as it was connected, making for great plug-and-play compatibility.
The first thing I wanted to try was partitioning the drive. I had a task I wanted to perform (backing up my PS3's hard drive) that required a FAT32 partition. However, there's no sense in converting the whole drive to that file system, so I opted to keep the other partition NTFS for more flexibility. So I fired up Partition Magic, and this is where a bit of trouble started.
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