[Macworld]

Post your comments for OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro (1TB) here

[MacosNerd]

I own the 500gig version of the Elite-AL Pro and I can attest that is an excellent product. OWC's customer service is tops, the drive looks great and operates very fast all for nice price :)

[Argent]

OWC also sells an "enclosure-only" version of the Elite-AL Pro, so that you can use any SATA hard drive you happen to have lying around. Works great for me.

[whitedog]

What surprises me is that eSATA is only slightly faster than FireWire 800 in your tests. I thought the differential was greater. The small differences hardly seem to justify the added expense of getting an eSATA card for the drive.

[Philbert]

The reason eSATA is only slightly faster than FW 800 is because of drive performance - the hard drive itself starts becoming the bottleneck at FW 800 throughput. To really see the difference, you need to be running a multi-disk RAID 0 setup.
-phil

[agal471]

You fail to mention that this drive comes with a top of the range Hitachi Deskstar drive that is standard with this model (http://www.storagereview.com/HDS721010KLA330.sr), not to mention the 5 yr warranty with the hard drive itself(2 from OWC & 3 extra from Toshiba) & that it also comes with all 4 interface cables, unlike the WD Quad noted above that has no eSata cable & only an 800-400 cable for the FW800 slot. At least you get what you pay for!!!

[mdawson]

As Philbert has already indicated, interface bandwidth has nothing to do with the throughput of a given device connected by that interface unless of course the interface in question is old and is itself a bottleneck. No device is going to magically perform faster than its design limits allow because it is on a faster bus. FireWire 800’s maximum theoretical bandwidth significantly exceeds the best data transfer rates of any modern hard drive, so there is no legitimate reason to expect anything but marginal differences in performance between a FireWire 800 and eSATA attached hard drive.
Contemporary bus design is supposed to exceed need not meet it. Top tier FireWire and eSATA offer much more bandwidth than a single drive requires, but offer plenty of headroom for stripped RAID.

[DHart]

I have two Mercury Elite AL double wide enclosures and a Mercury Elite single case as well... into which I have installed my own separately purchased Seagate and Hitachi hard drive mechanisms.
THe reviewed drive is a great drive indeed with an excellent internal drive and great array of cables... but you can save a lot by buying the Mercury Elite case empty from OWC and buy a Seagate Barracuda 1 TB drive from Frys.com when they're on sale for $189. Total cost about $270 or so.
And by buying your internal drive mechanisms separately, you can open the enclosures to swap drives around all you wish without voiding any warranties. Mercury Elite cases are the good stuff. I use the double wide Mercury Elite cases to hold a 750 GB primary drive and a 1TB Time Machine drive - both in the same case.... they mount on the desktop as two separate drives, one backing up the other with TimeMachine. I love the set-ups, no data loss worries, slick and easy.

[Bobapple]

I have the 1 TB drive and it's been excellent, just as the review says. One thing I'd add - this is one noisy mofo. My formerly silent workspace now has a constant whirrrr happening and when the drive is writing, you'd swear someone was arc welding behind my iMac. So far, it has worked flawlessly with Time Machine and given the comments I've read about Time Machine challenges, I feel blessed.