Strengths: Rock solid enclosure that can take a hit

Weaknesses: none so far

Summary: I am a pro photographer that was using nothing but LaCie 1Tb firewire drives for a storage solution. I had three 1 Tb and one 300 gig. I'm a Mac user as well and use a MacBook Pro both 15" and a 17". In the past year I have had one and then two LaCie 1Tb drives go bad on me. When I say "go bad" I mean that one of the 500gig drives within the 1Tb enclosers (each of the 1Tb enclosers has 2x500gig stripped) fails on me making the whole 1Tb drive useless and in need of data recovery costing over $2,000!! After it happened to me the second time I did research with other pro photogs and found many using the mirrored hard drive solutions and many were using the Maxtor Turbo's. I disconnected the rest of my LaCie's after the second failure and purchased three of the 1.5Tb Maxtor's giving me an effective 750gig per drive since I set them up as RAID 1 mirrored. I am very pleased with the result and highly recommend this product. Each has 2x750 Seagate 7200rpm drives inside and the enclosed has a rubber bumper. I just saw a press release that Seagate now has a 1.5Tb drive coming out so 2x1.5Tb inside a similar case would double the storage (if you use RAID 1). I say buy the Maxtor and for sure **stay away from LaCie. I learned my lesson there and should have known since it's all over the internet how that product has so many failures. Check it out for yourself. Good luck to all!

Strengths: Huge capacity external HD - 1500GB with 3 interfaces

Weaknesses: Maxtor offers Only 1-year warranty

Summary: Huge capacity external HD - 1500GB with 3 interfaces:USB 2.0 ? 33 MB/sec;FireWire 400 ? 43 MB/sec;FireWire 800 ? 91 MB/sec.Transfter data in seconds.It can be set up as either RAID 0 and 1 configuration.It is fast, reliable,and silent.The only problem is the warranty - Maxtor offers Only 1-year warranty for this huge capacity external HD. As data backup, 1-year warranty is surely not enough for your data. So buy it using Amex card to extend warranty.

Strengths: Size, Price and RAID1 (mirror) setup available

Weaknesses: I had a major data loss within the first week.

Summary: This is the first external Maxtor drive I have owned, but the first I set up as a RAID1 (mirroring) drive. I had a major data loss on the drive and after several calls to tech support the issue went unresolved and the RAID1 setup was of no value unless I wanted to open up the drive , void the warranty and see if the mirror drive had any of the missing/lost data on it. I will admit that I am unsure if the drive lost the data or if it was due to the program I was using (Photoshop Lightroom). However, when I ran Seagated data recovery program some of the missing files showed up, but not most of them. The missing files might very well be on the mirrored drive, but I can't find out without taking the drive apart and examining each drive indavidually.

Strengths: Enormous storage capacity. Easy to install. Fast transfer rates. Very quiet.

Weaknesses: Not the least expensive model out there. Maxtor recently got bought by another company, so the quality of future tech support is an unknown.

Summary: HUGE capacity at a reasonable price per gigabyte. Extreme ease of set-up, especially with a Mac. Versatile, with both Fire Wire 400 and 800 and USB 2.0 connections, and wicked fast. And It's either RAID 0 and 1 configurable. I would recommend this drive to anyone who wants a lot of storage space or back-up capacity.

Strengths: High capacity, variety of fast interfaces, RAID 0 or 1, quieter than competitors

Weaknesses: Only 1-year warranty (Seagate warranty for internal drives are currently 5-year), interfaces are too slow to achieve peak performance of this unit

Summary: This is a great drive for anyone, especially Mac users who are looking to add additional storage. I would not recommend using RAID 0 unless you are using this for a scratch drive. It's just too risky to use RAID 0 because if one drive fails, then all your data is lost. But like I said, using it as a scratch drive where you don't care if the data is lost is fine.I only use it in RAID 1 mode and found the performance to be acceptable. The problem with this unit is that the fastest interface supported is Firewire 800, which yields a theoretical maximum bus speed of 100 MB/s. According to Maxtor here are the sustained transfer rates:Sustained Transfer Rate USB 2.0 ? 33 MB/sec; FireWire 400 ? 43 MB/sec; FireWire 800 ? 91 MB/secThat means that if you have this unit with other hard drives connected to the same Firewire 800 bus, then you will saturate your bus before you max out the throughput of this drive. If you want to get peak performance, you probably have to put this drive on its own Firewire bus or card. That means taking up a PCI slot in your computer.If you're looking to have more than one unit connected to your computer and you need RAID 0 or 1, then I would seriously consider a SATA external enclosure instead. That would give you much higher bus speeds and performance. Unfortunately most mainstream manufacturers do not yet make external SATA enclosures.

Strengths: Storage of monster size files and folders a breeze.Fast as lightning on Firewire 800.Best looking external drive of it's size on Market

Weaknesses: There are no weaknesses I see, other than price. But remember you get what you pay for.I Wish it had Esata interface also.

Summary: This is by far the best external hard drive I have ever owned, And I have had them all in my business. My Western Digital 1 TB (My Book Premimum) sucks in comparison to this drive.