The main concerns I see with the EZ-Backit surround its' interface with
the adapter cable/PCMCIA card. The cable, consisting of nothing more then a
standard enhanced IDE plug with a nice housing makes contact with the bare pins
on the back of the 2.5" hard drive. Emphasizing that care must be taken when
hooking up the drive is an understatement. There are a good two or three
millimeters of space around the tiny-IDE connector and plastic housing so
misalignment is a real possibility.
If a "D" type jack (or I guess just about anything made for multiple
connects and reconnects in an open environment) were used, the chances of
wrecking the jack by bending or misalignment would be greatly reduced. Break one
of these pins on the hard drive and you loose the entire drive, no to mention the data.
The cable is nice, about 12" long, and hooks up to the PCMCIA card with a
more robust type of connector.
Hardware:
From taking a close look at the actual drive used in the EZ-Backit we
know that Apricorn is using a Hitachi DK23AA 2.5" 12GB drive. The particular
specs on this drive are as follows:
9.5 mm high drive for large capacity slimline notebooks
Two platters of 10.7 Gb/in(2) areal recording density
Giant MR head and MEEPRML read channel technology
32-bit RISC micro processor, shock sensor, S.M.A.R.T.
Rotational speed 4200 RPM
12.4 -20.6 MB/s
internal transfer rate
Interface Transfer
rate of 16.6 MB/s max (PIO Mode 4, DMA Mode 2)
ATA-5 interface (enhanced IDE) with 512 kB read/write
cache
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