Works great
I bought this drive to use a Time Machine backup. Regardless of the disk format, I always run a quick format and disk check just to make sure. The disk is fast and quiet. It's the second Cavalry drive I own of this type. The other is almost identical but has an esata interface and is connected to my DVR - a grueling task. That drive has been running flawlessly for...
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Awful
The drive arrived...and was defective. It constantly disconnected and re-connected itself...randomly. I'd be in the middle of trying to send a file to the drive and a message would pop up saying the drive had been improperly disconnected and data might have been damaged/lost. It certainly wasn't me who disconnected the drive - the drive disconnected itself. Or - while...
The drive arrived...and was defective. It constantly disconnected and re-connected itself...randomly. I'd be in the middle of trying to send a file to the drive and a message would pop up saying the drive had been improperly disconnected and data might have been damaged/lost. It certainly wasn't me who disconnected the drive - the drive disconnected itself. Or - while simply surfing the internet, not even trying to use the drive, I'd get the same error message popping up...suddenly: the drive has been disconnected improperly. Then, all on its own, again, the drive would re-connect itself. On and off, shorting in and out; a horrible glitch...making the drive completely unreliable/unuseable. I called the manufacturer for tech support. They wouldn't talk to me on the phone, insisting that I email tech support - which I instantly did. I emailed them 3 times over 3 days and got nothing in response...by phone or email. Finally - tech support did call me...only to say what I already knew: "the drive is defective." I'd never heard of Cavalry, it was the least expensive drive with that much space available - I took a chance. An old friend of mine always said "the cheap pay twice." My advice is: pay only once by buying from a quality manufacturer to begin with. Don't gamble on cheap. Or you'll be paying, as I am now, to ship the item you bought in good faith - and received in bad shape - back to Amazon. Awful.
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I learned pretty quickly why this drive had such a low price. It is because it doesn't work.
I have an iMac. I plugged this in with firewire and the drive immediately appeared and I was able to copy files to and from it. That lasted 10-15 minutes. After that the Mac Finder stopped responding and I had to turn off this hard drive to get it to snap out of it. Several similar attempts later, I turned it off and left it off.
A couple days later, I thought I'd give it a try using USB instead. This time it seemed to be working fine and gave no problems working with it for over an hour. It continued to be fine for several days (I only used it sporadically), but one day the Finder froze up again and once again I had to turn off this hard drive to get it to wake up. It has since worked fine on USB (about a week) without another lockup.
I don't feel at this point that this drive can be trusted at all. As a firewire drive, it is completely unusable. As a USB drive it is unreliable. I don't feel secure in putting any important data on this drive, not being sure if I'll get that data back.
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This review is from: Cavalry Storage CACE Series 1 TB USB / Firewire 800 Mac-Ready External Hard Drive CACE3701T0 (Electronics)
THE GOOD:
Solid case. It includes a particularly quiet, green (i.e. energy-efficient) hard drive and power supply in a high quality case, firewire 800 and USB cables, and a nice blue LED light, and on/off switch. 2 firewire 800 ports (for daisy-chaining). Note, it does come with a 800-800 cable NOT a 800-400 cable, contrary to the picture on the manufacturer's website, but this is arguably a good thing.
THE BAD:
1) This product was oversold. 2)It keeps making my Mac hang.
1[...]The spec page</a> claims "Sustained data transfer rates up to 100MB/sec".
I didn't get very close to that. EVER. I got an otherwise very respectable 69 MB/sec. But that spec led me to believe they were shipping it with one of the faster 1TB HDs, rather than the slowest one available.
I bought the drive specifically to use with my MacBook Pro at firewire
800 speed, namely the "Sustained data transfer rates up to 100MB/sec"
advertised.
With a firewire 800-800 (9-pin to 9-pin) cable,
the maximum read speed (on the fastest part of the disk) is 69MB/sec.
Quite impressive, but a ways from the sustained 100MB/sec advertised. I was expecting 85-95 MB/second.
[...]says there are TB drives that can easily meet this spec. What HD is
inside the CACE3701T0? A Western Digital WD10EACS, which the tomshardware link shows is the slowest TB HD - it can't reach 100MB/sec sustained transfer rates. The WD10EACS is a Caviar drive, so it has a 3-year warranty.
2)I noticed that when I had the drive attached, my Mac would freeze after a day or so, and would thaw if I unplugged the drive. Troubleshooting and Apple and Cavalry both being accommodating led to my logic board being replaced, and me getting an advanced-replacement unit. Well, the machine hangs with either Cavalry unit, while it's stable with no drive, or other external drives (I have 2 other firewire drives, though they're firewire 400, not 800.)
Also, it came rather poorly packaged - the foam blocks didn't hold the HD
properly in the cardboard shipping box.
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This review is from: Cavalry Storage CACE Series 1 TB USB / Firewire 800 Mac-Ready External Hard Drive CACE3701T0 (Electronics)
I bought this drive to use a Time Machine backup. Regardless of the disk format, I always run a quick format and disk check just to make sure. The disk is fast and quiet. It's the second Cavalry drive I own of this type. The other is almost identical but has an esata interface and is connected to my DVR - a grueling task. That drive has been running flawlessly for over a year so I purchased this for light-duty backups.
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This review is from: Cavalry Storage CACE Series 1 TB USB / Firewire 800 Mac-Ready External Hard Drive CACE3701T0 (Electronics)
The Cavalry 1TB drive has been a great addition to my system. Used for mostly video recording, editing and DVD authoring, the Firewire 800 interface is the most used connection for me. The drive also has Firewire 400, and USB 2.0 connections ... I've found this to be helpful for chaining together older drives. It is durable, and has proven to be reliable thus far, after 8 months of continuous use.
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