I reviewed the Cavalry Cace3701T0 Firewire external hard drive on
Amazon.com. They posted my review, and then some time later,
removed it!
This is the product:
Cavalry-Firewire-Mac-Ready-External-CACE3701T0
This is the
Amazon-censored performance review. Please, let me know if
you think the censorship was appropriate or not, and if this is part of
a pattern of behaviour by Amazon. I'd be surprised to see
Jeff Bezos OK this kind of action. AMAZON CENSORED THIS REVIEW.
THE GOOD:
Overall, this is a solid product. It includes a particularly
quiet, green (i.e. energy-efficient) hard drive and power supply in a
high quality case, firewire 800 and USB cables, and a nice blue LED
light, and on/off switch. 2 firewire 800 ports (for
daisy-chaining). Note, it does come with a 800-800 cable NOT
a 800-400 cable, contrary to the picture on the manufacturer's website,
but this is arguably a good thing.
THE BAD:
This product was oversold.
The spec page (RIP; archive) claims "Sustained
data transfer rates up to 100MB/sec".
Well, I didn't get very close to that. I got an otherwise
very respectable 69 MB/sec. But that spec led me to believe
they were shipping it with one of the faster 1TB HDs, not the slowest
one available.
I bought the drive specifically to use with my MacBook Pro at firewire
800 speed.... the "Sustained data transfer rates up to
100MB/sec" advertised.
With a firewire 800-800 (9-pin to 9-pin) cable, the maximum read speed
(on the fastest part of the disk) is 69MB/sec.
Quite impressive, but a ways from the sustained 100MB/sec
advertised. I was expecting 85-95 MB/second.
tomshardware.com says there are TB
drives that can easily meet this spec. What HD is inside the
CACE3701T0? A Western Digital WD10EACS (SATA 2), which the tomshardware link
shows is the slowest TB HD - it can't reach 100MB/sec sustained
transfer rates. The WD10EACS is a Caviar drive, so it has a
3-year warranty.
Also, it came rather poorly packaged - the foam blocks didn't hold the
HD properly.
NEW: it's a flaky system. Hangs my MBP regularly, keeps it
from booting.
Keeps causing my MacBook Pro to hang: my system will suddently start to hang within several
hours of my plugging in the HD. Any application that tried to access the HD would hang; patience didn't help. Trying to unmount didn't help.
Without the HD, it doesn't hang.
Sometimes I can revive the system by running
sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/
Sometimes that doesn't work.
Once frozen, it would thaw if I unplugged the drive. But of course that wasn't much consolation. I'd rather not be constantly told by warning messages to worry I may have lost data or corrupted the filesysem by unplugging the drive that way, or to frequently find fileystem coruption.
My own troubleshooting and Apple and Cavalry both being accommodating led to my logic board being replaced, and me getting an advanced-replacement unit. Well, the machine hangs with either Cavalry unit, while it's stable with no drive, or other external drives (I have 2 other firewire drives, though they're firewire 400, not 800.)
I reposted my review maybe 2 years later and it hasn't been taken down again.
S/N: WCASJ0989417 Need an eBay Sniper?