OWC shoves 750GB hard drive into Mercury On-The-Go Pro
By Darren Murph 
posted Sep 5th 2009 1:02AM
posted Sep 5th 2009 1:02AM
[Via Electronista]
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
5400RPM?
Yup, it really is 5200RPM:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go
You can get the FW400 version for $20.00 more.
Or you can buy the enclosure separately and put your own drive in. I did that years ago, and have used it for such things as Carbon Copy Cloner duping my drive before OS update (sadly, I forgot to do so before Snow Leopard).
-Pie
Ah - I thought I'd be a Scorpio. Does anyone know if one of these Scorpios will fit into a Studio XPS 16? I've already maXeds out my 500GB. Forgive my spelling - my iPhone is vein slow and dumb and I'm too lazy to fix it.
Why does anything Apple/mac related need to have the name "pro" at the end? Why is there the need to create some sort of illusion just to sell products? If everything continues to be named pro, soon the lines of distinction will be blurred so much that it's just pointless.
It gives normal consumers an excuse to pay the price tag.
other than their 13" macbook pro, i don't recall everything they do being pro related that doesn't have a somewhat higher class spec. Is there an iPod pro? a mac mini pro? a cinema display pro? That's OWC not apple.
Where the hell did you read Apple ANYWHERE in that article??
Well, its an OWC drive. As far as i remember those are traditionally "mac drives", generally having firewire and a styling matching (old school) macs, so i guess it is fair to say mac.
I'm sorry, Matt, but the majority of Apple's MacBooks do not deserve the moniker "pro". We all know the Macbook itself is not all that much different than the pros. An aluminum body does not help with performance.
And yes, the Apple came in because OWC is primarily a 3rd party Apple company.
Eddie.exe
You visit the OWC website? What is their web address again? Oh yeah, it's www.macsales.com. What do they sell? Oh yeah, anything and everything Mac related.
I wonder how he was able to put two and two together so easily and you could not. Nice work there buddy.
For anybody that has any other doubts about how this is Mac related, this is what OWS has to say about themselves "Retailer and manufacturer of Mac related hardware and software including memory, accelerators, hard drives, CDR/DVD, FireWire, and accessories."
5400RPM for real? i could write my shit down faster ..
5400 RPM isn't even the issue, it's that crappy USB 2.0 interface. To really get useful performance out of it the drive should sport at least a FireWire 400. Any FireWire connection actually has sustained transfer rates as opposed to the huge drops USB suffers from. My LaCie Rugged portable is 5400 as well but I have it connected to my MacBook Pro via FireWire 800 and it's crazy fast.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MS8U5750GB8/
Yay for read link.
@FoxKenji: After talking with many companies, I found that support for Firewire is being phased out. Although the max percentage and power capability are usually better than USB, the new USB standard is a good bit faster. So, for smaller transfers, USB 3.0 should theoretically be faster, by over a Mbit/sec. While I do prefer firewire (though all the firewire/usb drives I have are faster on USB setting), this is what I've been told.
I'm not totally sure on this, but isn't it true that the bigger your drive is, the more compressed it is? More compression=less space needed to move to read/write data, and therefore faster data transfer speeds? Theoretically from what I've heard, a 1TB drive running at 5200RPM would read and write as fast as a 500GB 10400RPM hard drive.
If that's right at all, this drive would probably be an OK choice after all for speed, right?
Copying 50gig of movie onto my other drive right now. Still and hour and thirty left.
ugh
That is unbeliveably overpriced.
No doubt. Am I smoking crack here or haven't I seen 1TB drives in the sub-$100 range recently? With USB 2, eSata, and firewire to boot. Of course they weren't built with and emphasis on Mac, but surely even hardcore Mac acolytes won't fall for this will they?
It's a 2.5" laptop drive, not a traditional desktop form factor.
Bumps up the price.
wouldn't put a single octet on a Hitachi drive.
Is this 3.5" or 2.5" ?
exactly what i was trying to find out as well..
2.5"
I wonder if heat would be a problem with the case. Looks kind of cozy in there.
There's a heat sink at the bottom of the case, but even with that it still get toasty during activities with my 7200rpm 200gb.
You know, depending on storage density, it might not matter too much 5400 vs 7200. And at 750GB, this is probably pretty dense. You should still get good speeds.
No, you won't. Because this is USB 2.0 only. You could have a Velociraptor in that thing and it would be painfully slow. I doubt there are drives out there that are slower than USB 2.0, so just stick in the slowest drive you can find, everything else would be wasted.
Uh, OWC offers these drives in 3 options: USB only, FW400 and a FW800/400/USB model.
Of course it'll have fast read/write speeds.
I think he's making the connection of OWC being a huge online apple outlet.
A stretch to start a war but hell, since when do trolls need a real reason.
hitachi...
I own 3 of these 120, 320, and 500. If this is the same it is a 2.5" 9mm. It would mean 750 in almost any lappy.
This is 12.5mm :s
This is a 2.5" drive but its powered completely by USB hence bus powered drive. THATS why its a little pricey.
Have we seen bare 750GB 2.5" drives yet?
Naughty boy. Go take your hardrive porn somewhere else!
I'm thinking the same thing, it was only a few days ago i heard about the 640Gb 2.5"s...
This is likely a 14.5mm 2.5" drive. Which means it won't really fit in any laptop you might have, but it will fit in this enclosure.
Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD7500KEVT
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=42075
I hope this (not the product specifically) means that we're almost getting to the stage where we're expecting USB 3.0 as a connection option...
I love the design. It conveniently allows you to determine whether the built-in hard disk is a sufficiently robust model or, rather, one notorious to be a rapidly failing POS.
i bought an empty Merc On the Go for $25, USB 2.0 only, when I upgraded the drive in my MacBook Pro. Put a 320gb wd black in the Merc, used Carbon Copy Cloner to cloned the data in my MBP to the WD black, then did the ol' drive switcheroo, and BOOM! 320gb, 7,200 rpm goodness in my MBP and a halfway decent, 80 gig drive in a bus-powered exclosure.
i've had zero problems with the Merc in the year or so that i've had it. rock solid and good speed. came with a carrying pouch and cable, to boot.
good stuff.
Re: "What you could fill it with"
What ever happened to the CE Oh no he didn't posts? Those were cool.
This is a Hitachi drive it seems. Do know what they are used for.
The pr0n drives are seagates!
Engadget, stop posting wrong stuff and do your research before!!!11!!!eleven!!!
Whoa Bro It's Effin Pro!
(don't take the above seriously)
It's strange, for years storage technology did catching up with the graphics cards and cpu's.
And now with the SSD it really has broken loose => OCZ 800Mbps !!!
Crazy low prices for tiny HDD with gigabytes you'd have a hard time filling (torrent and other illegal ways excluded).
SSD allready has a better MTBF, now all it needs is a price drop, and a speedbump here and there.
I'm never averse to shoving a large capacity hard drive into anything.
OWC's drives come pre-formatted in the Mac file system.
Eddie.exe @ Sep 5th 2009 2:15AM
Where the hell did you read Apple ANYWHERE in that article??
Did you click on the read link? OWC's website is macsales.com. Gee, I wonder where he got that from.
This is incredibly overpriced. By "portable" I assume OWC means 2.5 inch form factor- I can visit Newegg right now and get a 500GB Seagate drive for $90 and slap it in a $10 off-brand enclosure, and I have myself a slightly smaller drive for less than half the price. At that price, I could get 2 and have 1TB of external storage around for less than OWC is charging for a 750GB drive in a clear plastic box. I'm a Mac user, and I would never stoop so low as to pay that much for the convenience of not having to perform the onerous task of opening disk utility and clicking "format," which is something I do with every external drive I own. Nobody should be conned into buying this drive.