SimpleTech External Drives Suck

At work, we purchased some SimpleTech 1TB drives for use with our disaster recovery plan and let me just start off by saying that these drives would cause more of a disaster than relieving one.

The drives come in a plastic case that feels really quite fragile and flimsy. There are small vents on the bottom of the drive for cooling purposes, but the slots are very thin and probably would let in much air to flow in and out of the casing anyways. There isn't even a fan in the casing to get the air moving.

The problem with the thin air vents and no fan is that this drive will overheat. When it overheats, the drive will restart itself and break connection. This is not something that you're going to want to deal with in a DR situation.

With that, I decided to try and re purpose this drive. I've never tried time machine in OS X Leopard so I wanted to give that a shot. Backing up data to this drive was somewhat slow. Not necessarily the drive's fault, but slow either way. When using time machine, the drive would consistently overheat and power off.

These drives are just so pathetic and worthless. I wouldn't want to store anything that is valuable to me on this drive at all. Its really quite odd because the smaller SimpleTech drive that I got to use with my MacBook works fine. I can leave that drive plugged in all day with no problems. Either way, if you're looking for an external hard drive with high capacity, avoid these SimpleTech drives at all costs. Unless you don't really care about the data that you're storing on these drives. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!