Simply trying to read the drive, Partition Magic spat out the following: "error 110 on the partition table starting at sector 2048 on disk 2. The length of the partition in the partition table is incorrect. The CHS length is 625151362, the LBA length is 625137664, and the File System length is 625137663." Looking into the error, the drive needed to be reformatted before it would be properly recognized. I tried doing a standard Windows format, and it said it was unable to complete the operation. After this, the entire drive became unreadable, forcing me to manually delete the entire partition and recreate it, reformat it, and re-label it. Bizarre.
From then on, things seemed to be working fine, but it was a rough start, which I hope was just a fluke. Granted, OWC is big on Mac peripherals, but any external hard drive should be compatible with just about any system these days.
Now that we're back up and running, the manual HDD backup of a PS3 internal 60GB hard drive to the Mercury took about an hour, which wasn't unreasonable by any means (restoring it to the new PS3 drive took the same amount of time). I later tested copying the 5.5GB Crysis Warhead folder from my internal SATA drive to the NTFS partition on the Mercury and it only took about three and a half minutes. Everything's working as it should.
After a month or so of daily use, no other problems have emerged with the drive, and with the inclusion of all needed cables, a carrying case, backup software, and the wealth of connectivity options, the OWC Mercury On-The-Go nets a pretty solid recommendation.
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