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Home >> Photography >> Digital OWC Mercury on the Go Portable Hard Drive
eSATA is another interface that is becoming more popular and is now offered on more PCs as a standard connection. eSATA offers even faster speeds than FW800. However, I only see eSATA used with hard drives whereas FW800 is also used with flash card readers and FW800 is currently the fastest way to get your files uploaded from the card to the computer. To test out the FW800 waters and get a taste of that forbidden “apple”, I ordered three products from Other World Computing (OWC), which is best known amongst the Mac community for supplying quality parts and accessories. Most of OWC’s products are also PC compatible and there’s no problem with using the products with Windows. I ordered a FW800/USB 2.0 expansion card in PCI-Express flavour, as well as an ExpressCard 34 FW800 adapter for my notebooks:
I did not have any problem with installing, mounting and having the cards recognized by Windows Vista. These would provide the FW800 interface for the computer, but I also needed a FW800 device to test them out with and make sure everything works as desired. To fulfill this end, I ordered OWC’s Mercury on the Go (MOG) portable hard drive. There are a few different options available with the OWC MOG drives, with various combinations of USB 2.0, eSATA, FW400 and FW800 interfaces. Obviously, I chose the FW800 version, which also comes with a mini USB 2.0 port. Hard drive options are copious with your choice primarily coming down to how much storage do you need and how fast do you need the hard drive to be. There are only a few notebook hard drives that run at 7200 RPM while most run at 5400 RPM (the really old school drives run at 4200 RPM). Currently, the fastest 7200 RPM drive maxes out at 320 GB, while the largest capacity drive maxes out at 500 GB at 5400 RPM. You can order the 500 GB drive from OWC to go into a MOG case, but the speedy 320 GB, 7200 RPM drive is not yet offered as o this writing. I compromised on capacity and cost by ordering a 160 GB drive running at 7200 RPM, which tags in at USD $190. The Mercury on the Go It is solid though with a nicely thick, transparent plastic case. The transparent case allows you to see that the hard drive sits in an aluminum cradle that also acts as a heat sink for the fast running drive. The bottom of the case has an opening for the fins of the heat sink to be exposed to air and provide some air cooling.
The front of the MOG has two LEDs to indicate power on and activity with the drive. The rear of this particular FW800 MOG offers two FW800 ports, a USB 2 mini port, an On/Off switch and a power outlet for an optional power adapter (more about this later on).
Overall fit and finish is excellent and the OWC MOG certainly feels like a quality piece of hardware.
Usage I first connected the MOG to my day-to-day computer, the Acer 9920 notebook via the USB 2 connection and supplied cable. Transfer times were at best average with a sustained transfer speed of less than 10 MB per second. Having used the Acer’s USB 2 ports with various devices, I know that the ports are capable of supporting much higher speeds. However, no matter, because USB 2 was not why I bought the MOG; onto FW800. Note, whenever I talk about the transfer speed specs citing MBs per second, I’m using a rough average or ballpark figure as provided by the Windows information screen that estimates the time and transfer speed. These figures tend to fluctuate up and down and I’ve found that the larger the number and size of files, the slower things will get. I don’t trust Window’s time estimates and clocked the time manually by counting from the time I click on the Copy or Move to when the Windows information screen disappears from the screen. Not scientific, but at the least, consistent with how I timed all the tests. Big anticipation turned into disappointment as I got nothing when I connected the MOG to the ExpressCard FW800 adapter plugged into the Acer. The card was detected and mounted as it should with Vista, so I was left wondering what the problem could be. Digging into the instruction manuals for both the MOG and the ExpressCard adapter got me the answer.
Unfortunately, using an ExpressCard interface denies the external device of any bus power and requires that either the external device be powered, or the ExpressCard be powered by an external source independent of the computer. This is why the MOG has an external power port, so that if need be, you could juice the MOG and let it work with ports that do not provide any power to the device. After reading the specs of the ExpressCard and MOG I went digging through my assorted storage bins to see if I had a compatible AC/DC (no, not the Aussie rock band) switching power adapter. As luck would have it, the adapter/charger for my Nexto portable hard drive had the exact specs needed to juice the ExpressCard.
I plugged in the Nexto’s adapter into the ExpressCard and turned on the MOG and hot damn, lights were a flashing and I was in business…until I started using it and noticed how abysmal the speed was at around 1.5 MB per second. There’s not a hope in hell that FW800 could be that slow, even if the ExpressCard adapter is not as speedy as a native port directly connected to the motherboard (actually, specifically related to my Acer, there is a problem with FW800, as explained in the test section below). I stopped the transfer process, which seemed to take forever to cancel and then tried the MOG with my desktop computer. This is when the drive stopped working entirely, no matter which port I used (USB 2 or FW800) and no matter which of my three computers I tried. I left it overnight to see if that might help, but same thing. I requested an RMA from OWC and returned the kit back to Illinois, where OWC is based out of. Two weeks later, I received a package from OWC with a brief test report indicating that the case and cables tested fine, but the hard drive did not. OWC replaced the hard drive in the same case and sent back the original package to me. This is relatively speedy response from OWC to replace the hard drive, but I’m a little chagrined that I had to pay for the S&H to return the defective unit back to OWC (most of the two week time was actually because I returned the package via the cheapest alternative available through Canada Post). Other vendors I’ve dealt with for similar problems have paid for the return freight by providing me with a courier account number. OWC to its credit did send me the replacement with faster delivery than the original shipment via US Postal Service. I repeated my testing of the new MOG and joy to the world; every test except one was much faster through USB and FW800. My basic test is simple and is nothing more than having a folder of 100 Nikon D300 RAW files (1.85 GB) copied over to the MOG and then copied back to the hard drives my computers. The computers are a custom, dual quad core Xeon (eight cores) box running Vista Ultimate 64, an Acer 9920 Core2Duo notebook, and a Sony NR160N notebook. Here are the results of the tests:
Conclusion Initial hard drive failure aside, I like this portable drive. Solid and capable of nice speeds, but they are a bit on the large and heavy side for a bus-powered portable drive. The size is almost the same as a naked 3.5 inch hard drive and in order to enjoy the speed of FW800 out in the field, I would need to use a notebook computer with native FW800 support instead of through an ExpressCard adapter (good luck finding one aside from the Apple MacBook Pro). In the short term, this makes the OWC MOG a USB 2 device if I were to use it away from the office. In the office it’s not a big deal for me to juice up the ExpressCard for use with the Acer or Sony notebooks. For those of you that don’t need the robust build quality of the OWC MOG, the Western Digital Passport drives are quite reasonably priced for larger capacities. Go to Costco and you can buy a 320 GB, 5400 RPM WD Passport drive for less than CDN $200. This is double the capacity of my OWC MOG and via USB 2, the speed may even favour the WD, because my older 160 GB Passport routinely offers faster speeds than any of my do-it-yourself USB 2 portable drives (buying the case and hard drive separately and then putting them together yourself).
Other options to look at are the Lacie Rugged Hard Disks, which house the 2.5 inch hard drive in a rubberized case with beefier construction than the typical portable drive case. Pricier than the OWC drives though, but some really like these Lacie drives, which also offer FW800 support and some 7200 RPM drive options. The speed of FW800 now has me wanting to see what the eSATA interface offers and I'm taking a hard look at Western Digital’s MyBook Studio external hard drives for possible inclusion into my backup and storage process. The MyBook Studio drives are formatted to work out of the box with Macs, but can be reformatted for Windows, so no problem there. The MyBook Studio offers a quad interface of connections from USB 2, FW400, FW800 and eSATA. Capacities range from 320 GB to 2 TB and prices seem reasonable if you were to buy from Costco or a discount computer shop. An attractive feature of all the WD MyBook drives is automatic turn on and off with the computer the drive is connected to. This feature makes it perfect to use the drive as a daily, continuous backup drive, e.g. Time Machine for Macs and any number of assorted backup utilities available for the PC. |
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The desire to seek out faster data access from external hard drives than is available from USB 2.0 has led me to Firewire 800. As some may know, the Firewire interface was created by Apple engineers and has been a prominent feature of Mac computers for many years, going back to the original Firewire 400, which is nominally similar to USB 2.0 for speed. USB 2.0 is theoretically faster than FW 400, but theory does not always hold out in actual usage and some say FW 400 is, on a practical basis, faster than USB 2.0.
Other items included in the package are:
One of the key benefits of using 2.5 inch notebook hard drives in external cases is that their power requirements are small compared to a desktop sized 3.5 inch hard drive. The smaller drives can be powered by the computer’s bus via the USB or the six pin FW400 and eight pin FW800 ports (not the 4-pin type of Firewire 400 connection though).
The results confirmed that FW800 is a very meaningful upgrade over USB 2.0. 
The WD Passports are also more compact and you can fit two Passport drives in the same space as what the OWC MOG takes up. However, just as some photographers have no qualms about spending more than double for a Nikon D3 versus a Nikon D300, there will some who will have no qualms about buying an OWC MOG, because of the build quality and connection choices available.
