The AcomData E5s Construction - AcomData E5 320GB External Desktop Storage: Slap on another
The AcomData E5’s Construction
AcomData has taken a regular consumer level hard disk drive, the Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE with 8MB of cache and 7200RPM spindle speed, and slapped it in a 3.5” external case with two methods of connectivity: USB and FireWire. Still, the E5 is not just that. If we were to look at external devices from a few years back, we would see the same off-white colored plastic cases with serial port connectivity and no other features, but the power connection and a few flashing LEDs.With the new generation of external devices come features such as PushButton™ Backup combined with software tailored to work with the drives to make backing up data as quick and painless as possible.
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The back panel features a red power switch at the top right corner of the device, which is obviously used to turn the device on and off. Below that to the left is the USB 2.0 port and below that port are two 6-pin FireWire 400 ports aligned vertically. With the dual FireWire ports, the E5 gives us the option of daisy chaining FireWire devices to it. For example, if we have two of these E5’s, all that is required is the connection between the first drive to the second by way of the FireWire cable. Now, if only we could RAID over FireWire!
The following 5 models are available from AcomData:
| Configurations for AcomData External Drives | |||||
| Model No. | Capacity | Rotational Speed | Cache (Buffer) | Seek Time (Read, typical) | Interface Transfer Rate |
| HD080UFAPE5-72 | 80 GB | 7200 RPM | 2 MB | 8.5 ms | USB 2.0: Up to 480 Mbps (60 Megabytes/s). FireWire 400: |
| HD120UFAPE5-72 | 120 GB | 7200 RPM | 2 MB | 8.5 ms | |
| HD160UFAPE5-72 | 160 GB | 7200 RPM | 2 MB | 8.5 ms | |
| HD250UFAPE5-72 | 250 GB | 7200 RPM | 8 MB | 8.5 ms | |
| HD320UFAPE5-72 | 320 GB | 7200 RPM | 8 MB | 8.5 ms | |
As we see from the table, the E5 comes in a variety of flavors including USB, FireWire 400, USB/FireWire 400, and USB/FireWire 400/FireWire 800. Our test unit is a Combo A version, according to AcomData’s documentation, which is the USB/FireWire 400 version of the E5.
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