Customer Reviews

Smartdisk XF160F CrossFire USB 2.0 / FireWire External Hard Drive - PC / Mac

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

All you have to do is plug in the power cord, the USB or FireWire cable and your computer will do the rest. The only reason I gave it four stars and not five is that it comes formatted in the FAT32 file type, which means it will accept only 4GB at a time. But I wanted to back up the complete system of my two computers. So what you need to do in that case is to right click the icon for the Crossfire and format it into NTFS and it will accept any size file (of course up to 160GB).

I was looking for a hard drive for use in editing home movies pulled from a DV camcorder. I originally considered a Lacie d2 Triple Interface (referring to compatibility with Firewire, USB 2.0, and USB 1.1). Unfortunately, these have become somewhat hard to come by. I then considered a Lacie d2 Firewire and found these are also becoming scare. These older models seem to be being replaced, in vendor inventories, by the d2 Extreme and d2 Extreme with Triple Interface. My only complaint is that whereas the older models had two Firewire 400 6-pin ports, the Extreme models have two Firewire 800 9-pin ports and only one Firewire 400 6-pin port, thus necessitating the purchase of relatively pricey Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 cables or adapters in order to daisy-chain the my DV camera through the drive to my computer which has only one Firewire port. Going for several dollars cheaper than a comparable Lacie product, the SmartDisk goes one better with its 7200RPM drive, compared to the Lacie's 5400RPM device.

In terms of use, I connected the drive, per the instructions, and my PowerBook recognized it with no problems. A quick visit to Disk Utility had it formatted to Mac OS in less than a minute - with it's out of the box Fat32 format, it had trouble copying some files from my Mac OS formatted primary drive. It has been working great for both DV editing and backups. No fans mean that it doesn't make any noise beyond the normal chatter of a hard disk. Having used external drives from Maxtor, Western Digital, Micronet, and Lacie on the job, I am very satisfied with this purchase for my personal use.

The SmartDisk gave me the most bang for my buck, partly due to not requiring me to purchase any additional expensive cables or adapters. The Crossfire is the perfect external storage solution if you aren't working with Firewire 800 peripherals.

Dear Harddisk seekers,
This was the cheapest 160GB harddisk I was able to locate of the web. It is around 2 weeks, that I have been using it and I am really happy with my purchase. It is fan less disk therefore is not noisy as compared to one with fans. It is easy and painless to install on XP. I have kept it running for 24 hours straight with constant downloading and it works without any problems. I am still puzzled with the $5 difference between 120gb and $160gb version. Does it only cost $5 more for 40gb more space? I sincerely recommend this to any one looking for a affordable external firewire/usb storage.

after 2-3 weeks like the others I tried. I went through Western Digitals and Maxtors till I found this baby. and after a few months it's still working great. I back up every 3-4 days, using around 80GB of it. never heard a bad sound, or experienced a hickup.
reliable, CHEAP compared to it's performance, and better than the competition.
a backup solution that will keep your artwork safe.

I purchased the 160 GB model about a week ago for my G5 Imac. When I received it, I noticed a sticker on the outside of the box saying that it was formated for Windows. "Oh, well" I thought, the description said that it was good for Mac and Windows, so I figured I would be fine. Big mistake! My Imac didn't recognize the drive and I needed a software patch from Smartdisk, but I had to go to another Mac with an older operation system than what was on my G5. Then, once that software patch was saved onto my new hard drive, I still had to reformat the drive to work on an Apple. Confused?! So was I! I couldn't figure out on Amazon's website how to buy one formated for Mac instead of Windows. Now that I'm hooked up, everything is totally cool and I love it.

I've had my Crossfire for about 6 months now and it has been flawless. I have a 5 year old latop with a measly 20GB on board and this thing has been a revelation. Its so quiet that I often forget to power it off after switching off the laptop and speed of access is very quick e.g. using it to instantly access and play music files through the iTunes library via a PCMCIA Firewire card. Setup was a doddle and so far, not one glitch to worry about... despite a severe XP registry failure last month.

I had purchased a Maxtor External Hard Drive and it did not work. I returned it to another vendor, and purchased the CrossFire. It is fast and reliable. My only disappointment was that I had to purchase software to organized the files on the Hard Drive.

I bought this HD because no one reported any problems with it.

Simply put, it does not work for me. I have a laptop with WinXP. The drive will mysteriously 'disconnect' without warning. For example, it just disconnected 4 times in the time it took to copy 500 MB. The first 3 times, the drive would reconnect when I unplugged then re-plugged the firewire. After the fourth time, the drive would not reconnect at all. It would only connect again after restarting the computer.

This is typical of every time I've attempted to use the drive. I exchanged it, because I thought it was broken. However, the replacement drive has the same exact problem.

The size and the design of the drive are okay. I was impressed with the features and the price. I am disappointed that, for me, this hard drive is unusable. If it actually worked, my only complaint would be that the drive gives off the faint smell of burning plastic.

My computer is on Windows XP and has USB 2.0, so the range of new, fast-running hard-drives available is good. I actually just plugged in the Cross-fire, and it is recognized as any other external storage device. Instead of scheduling back-ups (don't know if this is available, yet) I have organized my documents, pictures and music better and just does an easy copy from the regular hard drive to the Crossfire.
Next to that it is quite silent and the physical dimensions were a bit smaller than my wife had expected/feared.
= a good option for an easy/flexible back-up of your data.

For me, this external hard drive has been trouble-free for the past 10 months. It's great for backing up your very important documents and photographs. The price is kind of high for the amount of memory; considering there are larger-capacity hard drives out there.