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CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 11/10/2004
- Released on: 09/01/2004
Packaged in a matte-black plastic case, the EZ Bus Mini weighs 4.2 ounces and is about as big as a deck of cards. It easily fits into a shirt pocket or a side pocket in your laptop's carrying case. It is half as big as a 2.5-inch drive enclosure and tiny compared to Maxtor's OneTouch drives, although many other drives give a choice of connection method while the EZ Bus Mini uses only USB.
The secret to the EZ Bus Mini's small size is its miniature 1.8-inch Hitachi hard drive, which spins at 4,200rpm and has a 2MB buffer. The entire device is rated to take a shock of 225 g's, so it can be dropped with impunity. A small, green LED glows when the drive is connected and data is moving back and forth, which is useful for knowing when the device is working. Its petite form makes it easy to pass among users and machines, so the EZ Bus Mini is perfect for sharing data between members of a group. Just pull out the USB connector from where it nestles into the bottom of the drive, plug it into a USB slot, and your computer's operating system will set up the drive with the next available drive letter. The EZ Bus Mini works with Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Mac OS 9.2 but lacks Windows 98, Windows Me, and Linux support.
The Apricorn EZ Bus Mini drive comes formatted in FAT32, but reformatting it to the more flexible and efficient NTFS is easy. In addition to the drive, the package includes a soft case, a 3-foot USB extension cord, two software CDs, and a rudimentary 20-page user guide. The 40GB model yields 37.2GB of usable space. In our informal testing using an IBM ThinkPad R50, the EZ Bus Mini wrote a variety of files at 109.6Mbps and read them back at 102.3Mbps. This puts the EZ Bus Mini on a par with the much larger Maxtor OneTouch. It is also much faster than any of the Ethernet-based drives on the market. The drive stays cool and quiet even under intense use, but it consumed 25 more minutes of the R50's battery time than the notebook's native drive did performing the same tasks.
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