A Tale of Two Drives… (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Duo Pro Drive)
It is important to note, that this is the second time I have begun writing this review. The first, unfortunately, was lost due to the circumstances which you will read below. Please note, that no formal accusations as to the cause of WHY this is the second time I have begun writing this will be found in this product review.
However I feel that it IS important to note that my previous incarnation of the Duo Pro review was much less favorable then it is now. A fact that plays in important role in the context of this story.
“A Tale of Two Drives” starts out simply enough. I, the intrepid gear reviewer at ScribeMedia, had just finished my very favorable run with the G-Speed eS and had now received the SimpleTech Duo Pro Drive which I intended to transfer all my G-Speed data onto and begin working with.
My computer had been acting a little odd in the previous weeks, but was not doing anything that particularly caused me to raise an eyebrow (I do that quite often if something puzzles me.) I assumed it was just a coincidence that my machine began randomly crashing after I installed the eSATA card that came with my G-Speed (a fact that defiantly causes me to raise an eyebrow in retrospect).
The first step was, of course, to prep the Duo Pro for data transfer from the G-Speed…
Unboxing the drive left me with a slightly bad impression. The Duo Pro is a cheaper alternative to the G-Speed (a lovely hot-swappabe piece of aluminum I might add), and the Duo Pro obviously had to make some design concessions to match it’s price point. The design is very modern with well placed sections for ventilation on the top and bottom of the unit, as well as a curved side to make it feel a little less boxy. But I can’t deny that I wasn’t wishing that it was built of of metal rather then a high-grade plastic.
I plugged the drive in through it’s eSATA port (the Duo Pro comes with an eSATA and a USB 2.0 port) to the trusty card installed in my machine that came with my G-Speed eS.
Delighted with the potential for my new toy, I fired it up.
Unfortunately this is where my last review took a turn for the worse…
To save on a long story it took me about an hour of head-scratching and eyebrow raising, combined with about a half hour sitting on hold with tech support until I got the Duo Pro to be able to format itself as anything other then FAT32.
For those of you wondering this is the only drive I have ever received that I have had to un-partition in order to re-format the disk.
To say the least, I was not happy at this point.
I set my G-Speed to transfer data to the Duo Pro overnight and planned to start work the next morning.
Strangely enough however, those “little problems” with my computer I previously mentioned that I had been noticing seemed to be worse the next day… much worse.
So much so, that I could not do more then an hours worth of work before the system crashed on me. Making just about any task I had to accomplish, nearly impossible.
Now, I feel it is time to mention that I have long been a “hater” of using any drive on USB 2.0 when editing. I find them to be slow, untrustworthy, and often unsatisfactory.
But, stuck between a rock and a hard place (projects needing to be accomplished while my machine with the eSATA card was on the fritz) and I felt that maybe it was time I take a walk with my newly full Duo Pro drive over to another machine, and take the USB 2.0 plunge.
This is where my Duo Pro review takes a turn for the better.
For roughly the past month, my machine (with the eSATA card installed) has been back and forth to various apple repair shops. Each time it comes back, the problem is still not resolved.
This last time I sent the computer out for repair, it came back unable to recognize one of my internal storage drives (the one that had my previous, less than stellar Duo Pro review on it). But the Duo Pro and I have soldered on, floating from machine to machine, getting projects done through it’s surprisingly trustworthy USB 2.0 connection.
This little, lightweight two-terabyte hard drive has gained a significant amount of respect in my book. My only real complaint being that of it’s annoying set-up process and the fact that every time I plug it in to a new machine I receive a “this disk can not be read by this computer, please initialize disk” message (I click ‘Ignore’ and the Duo Pro mounts without problem).
Dollar for dollar I think the Duo Pro is a great purchase and would recommend it for those in the production space seeking more storage room. The only thing SimpleTech could do to make me really love the Duo Pro… add a firewire port.
Jason Kichline is ScribeMedia's project manager. He likes typos, fast food and MacGyver like solutions to life's nagging problems.
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