Customer Reviews

Fantom Drives TFDF25072 Titanium FireWire 250GB Hard Drive 7200rpm

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this drive less than a year ago. It's compact, fast and has an attractive, durable exterior design. However, I've had to send it back for warranty repairs twice (so far) in less than ten months of owning it, both times for bad blocks. The first repair took almost two weeks on total turnaround, the second a little over one week. I asked for a new drive on the second round, but was sent my old drive, repaired (for now) and with no explanation, whatsoever. Warranty repair instructions were cryptic, at best, and with just two months left in my warranty period, I'm not even sure if I want to spend the time involved in reloading a massive archive of images for the THIRD time. I might just keep this as a $200 door stop. Perhaps I'm spoiled by years of excellent customer service from Apple Corporation (not to mention excellent workmanship on their products, to begin with), but I expect better for my money, and this drive has been a big disappointment. I wouldn't recommend the drive or this company to anyone.

I've had this 250 GB Titanium model drive for about 2 years now and can't seem to find a complaint with it. It does what I was hoping to do, and I didn't go broke in the process. Admittedly, I hesitated to buy it based on some negative reviews, but as I was new to using external drives, and was on a limited budget, Fantom's reviews were still better than some others in the same price range, and so I gave it a shot.

I have used it with both an Apple iBook G3, as well as an Apple Mac G4 Dual, both running Mac OS X 10.3.x. It was easy for me to set up, and I've used it literally, every single day since it came out of the box, for backing up just about everything on my machine and then some. After two years, I still have about 60GB of free space left. It's compact in size which has been perfect for traveling with the laptop, and also for staying out of the way of other equipment when I use it with the desktop. Going back and forth between computers has never been a problem. It is relatively light for portability, but heavy enough to feel that it's solidly made. It's generally so quiet, that I have to crane my head around to make sure the blue light is still on. Only when I've really gone to town with transferring big files to and from the drive, have I ever really heard a good amount of whirring. And even with large audio and recording software files, it usually hasn't taken more than a minute or two of waiting time. Even when transferring large collections of audio or video data, I think the longest I've ever waited was about 10 minutes.

The Titanium name seems appropriate, too, as this drive's strong metal case has held up under the ultimate tests of hardcore use and sometimes accidental abuse. This drive has been packed up and taken outside of my apartment on many different occasions, plugged into other people's machines, accidentally unplugged without ejecting first, bumped into, dropped... even a minor coffee spill. And yet, the drive continues to work flawlessly and fast, with nary a mark on its case. In most cases, all I had to do was plug the Firewire cable back into the machine and it recognized the drive again. I've since been more careful about taking care of it and limiting other's access to it, but I'm now very confident that anything that might happen to the drive in the future, will most likely have been due to my own mistakes. But so far, no problems and I am much more careful now, as to not press my luck.

Because the drive has two Firewire ports on it, it has also been handy in other ways. When a friend's computer crashed and wouldn't read his own drive, and my computer wouldn't recognize his drive either... as a last resort, I connected his drive to my Fantom... and to my surprise, my computer could then retrieve the information from my friend's drive. Because my own computers had only one Firewire port, the Fantom has also been handy as a Firewire hub of sorts, where I was able to connect my mini DV camera to the computer, while the drive itself was still backing up the fresh footage I was shooting through Quicktime Pro, or transferring to Final Cut.

Anyway, I'm not sure where all the negative comments about Fantom comes from... (are people installing the drives properly? subjecting the drives to more regular abuse?) maybe there are some defective drives in the line, but as for me, I have been able to trust this one particular drive with precious Pro Tools and Final Cut sessions, screenplays, Web site work, correspondence, contracts, my iTunes music library, photos and more, for two years and going. Friends using names such as Maxtor and LaCie which I'm told have great reputations, have frequently told me about problems that I have never experienced with my drive... and I was warned heavily about buying anything other than those brands. But in hindsight, I felt I had no choice but to take a risk and well, that risk saved me about $100 or more and it turned out that I had a more pleasant experience than I might have had I bought just to stay within brand popularity. Because I will be doing more work this coming year that will need more memory, I will purchase another, bigger drive, but at this point, I will be very comfortable with buying another Micronet product, specifically of the Fantom line. And I feel that if I take better care of it than I did this one early on, I'm likely to continue not having problems.

I have two fantom drives and both have crashed. With how large these drives are, if you loose one its years of family pictures, with both crashing I have lost it all.

I had my computer checked by a local computer repair company and they agreed that it was the drives failing, not my computer.

I would look elsewhere.

I bought this about a year ago, and so far have not had ANY problems with it, whatsoever. It had a great price, tons of storage, works fast and everything! I love it, one of the best purchases I've made.