Formac External HD

17 Apr 2008 10:39:31

John Surtees

At the Bournemouth meeting, some people may have noticed that I bought a new Formac Maxi external hard drive. (One of the pluses of having a meeting at an Apple dealership.)

I've always been very satisfied with Lacie drives, but this time, decided to try a Formac Maxi 500GB. Available in a range of colours – well ok, black or white. The drive can be connected with Firewire 400, 800 or USB, and comes with cables for all three. Also in the box is a power lead and the usual transformer brick.

The drive is very easy to connect and is seen by the Mac instantly. However, out of the box, it is formatted in MS-DOS. Using Disk Utility, it was only a couple of minutes to get it changed to HFS+/Mac OS extended.

A big plus with this drive, is that it is almost silent in operation. As for speed, I don't know much about the relative speed of different drives, but using a Firewire 400 connection, it took just over three hours to transfer 150 gigs from a Lacie external.

Now the moan. Why, oh why, don't drive manufacturers tell you whether a drive can be used to boot from. After all the pluses, the big let down is that I am unable to use it with SuperDuper to create a bootable back-up. As luck would have it, I only needed it for storage, but it would have been nice to have had the facility.

Needless to say, for all it's good points, I wont be buying another Formac Maxi. I think I'll stick with Lacie.

Re: Formac External HD

17 Apr 2008 18:44:26

Mick Burrell

John, I'm sure you've done your research so what you say is correct but I'm surprised that an Apple dealer would offer drives which cannot boot OS X unless they point that out and say they stock them because there's a big price differential or some other compelling reason.

Re: Formac External HD

17 Apr 2008 21:56:50

Roy Rainford

I am interested in what you say John about having a non-bootable drive since (a) I have had a problem making a LaCie drive bootable (as Mick & Doug knows!) & (b) I am considering buying a 500Gb external drive & want to ensure that it can be made bootable. Any recommendations anyone? I thought they would all be bootable. What told you it wasn't bootable John?

Re: Formac External HD

18 Apr 2008 00:58:13

Mick Burrell

Roy - my LaCie is bootable

Re: Formac External HD

18 Apr 2008 08:26:56

John Surtees

Mick, In the past I've always been happy with Formac gear, it's not always been the tops for reliability, but they've had excellent aftersales support. In the past I've been able to ring them up and talk to very helpful people. I somehow don't think that's the case anymore. But it was with this in mind that I bought the Maxi. And as Solutions had one on the shelf, I momentarily forgot why I always buy Lacie these days.

I have three Lacie D2's, all of which boot using SuperDuper backup software. But their fan noise can get a little irritating at times. I agree, the ability to boot or not, is something you would expect a dealer to mention when making a sale.

Roy: Quotes from the SuperDuper User Guide:

Step 1: Prepare for your backup
First, you need to make sure you’ve got a place to store your backup. The
best thing to use with SuperDuper! is an external FireWire drive, but due to
various subtle incompatibilities, not all FireWire drives can act as a
Macintosh startup drive, and this is never indicated on the package.

Our general advice is to get a FireWire drive from Other World Computing,
WiebeTech, LaCie or a Maxtor OneTouch. We have tested these drives for
compatibility, and all work well with the Mac.

SuperDuper! can’t guarantee full-fidelity backups on a FAT32
(Windows) volume for a number of reasons, including the fact that
FAT32 doesn’t support files greater than 4GB in size. So, even though
you could store a backup on the drive using a disk image, that backup
will fail once the image reaches 4GB.
To fix this problem, use Disk Utility to erase the drive (of course, make
sure you don’t have any data on it you want to keep first), and use
Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format. While you’re there,
you should usually zero the drive (both the data and free space under
Tiger): this tests the drive surface, remaps any bad or weak spots, and
helps to ensure your first backup will be a successful one.

Re: Formac External HD

18 Apr 2008 12:57:23

Roy Rainford

Thanks John & Mick for the replies.