 solid construction, small form factor, excellent product |
| Review Date: October 18, 2007 |
| Reviewer: buru buru piggu, New York, NY USA |
When I took this out of the box, two things immediately struck me. One: how small it is. Two: the solid construction and brushed aluminum finish. I was really impressed by the quality and craftsmanship of this product. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but this drive looks and feels like quality stuff.
It's a full 2 inches shorter than a 1 TB Iomega drive I bought just 1 week before. I own several other drives with far less capacity, and this drive is even smaller than most of those. The size of 2 bricks stacked on top of each other (and about as heavy), this drive sits elegantly on top of the desk and doesn't take up a lot of space. It looks simple and classy with its solid metal case. On the back, the 5 cm fan can be turned on and off via a separate switch. The power plug is a standard round type insert, so if you somehow manage to lose it, you can easily buy a replacement. It doesn't have specially constructed pins that can break or bend.
As for reliability and speed, it is too early to judge. But I mainly bought this as a backup unit for my movies, so I am not being very demanding on the unit. I am very happy with this purchase and will recommend it to others.
** UPDATE - OCT 5 2008 **
I managed to outgrow the 1TB capacity and have acquired a few more 1TB single drive external hard drives in the last 3 months for my growing storage needs. With 1TB drives falling in price to about $130, I decided to hack this drive to see if I could make it into a 2TB unit. 2TB is the maximum volume size FAT-32 can support, and 1TB is the biggest sized SATA drive you can buy right now.
I'm pleased to report that this is very hackable and easy. Swapping out the drives take 5 minutes: just undo 4 screws in the back, slide out the drive bay, and swap out the 2 SATA drives inside with 2 new 1TB drives (each held in by 4 additional screws). Zip the patient back up, format and you've got yourself a new 2TB storage device. I formated this for FAT-32 because I want maximum compatibility in my diverse home network. From my Mac, formatting took about a minute or less. If you don't need this, you can go w/ NTFS.
Do this at your own risk, obviously, as this will void your warranty. |
What noise?
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| Review Date: January 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer: A. Blocher, Dallas, TX USA |
Other purchasers have complained about the loud fan so I was expecting the worst. I wasnt nearly as put off by the noise from the fan as other users have been. Its all relative, I guess. I am only using the drive to store music and video, so I only turn it on when I need to transfer data to or from the drive. It transfers data very quickly.
So far I am very pleased! |
Good price for a quality-build 1TB drive
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| Review Date: April 2, 2008 |
| Reviewer: M. T. Bradshaw, Boston, MA |
| I bought two of these things to store my digital music collection on (which is approximately 1.6TB). These replaced my old set of 250GB LaCie drives. Clearly, I favor the more reasonably priced drives. The first thing that struck me relative to my old LaCie drives is how much more solid the construction of the drive housing on the Cavarly drives is. They are pleasingly designed metal boxes, which 3 lights on the front. The big green power light, and 2 red lights that indicate when the drive is being written to or read from. The fan makes noise, but I don't understand the expectations of people who buy a pair of drives and expect it to sound like a paperweight. The fan keeps these guys cool, and they are and streaming music most hours of the day. I have been using the drives for 5 months now, and they work just as well as they ever have. No problems. Nada. What more can you say? $250 for 1TB. Crazy cheap, especially given the quality construction. And no, I am not affiliated with the company, as I suspect when people gush about a product, hotel, etc. I just like the drives. |
Amazon makes good!
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| Review Date: March 25, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Erdman, Madison, WI |
| I ordered this 1TB drive late in January, got it quickly, but it was DOA. Shipped it back, got the same kind again. This one works, it was a very good bargain. I can backup all my junk now. |
It just works...
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| Review Date: April 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: M. Grace, Cleveland, OH USA |
| Yeah compared to my CPU fan, this isn't loud at all. It's plug and play, had it out of the box and stuff copying to it within minutes. So far so good! |
Sturdy, silent and reliable
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| Review Date: August 22, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Jose Leal, California, United States |
| If you can never get enough space to store your HiDef movies (about 40 Gb each), software, music collections, etc, a good idea is to get one or more of these sturdy external units, which in my experience are very silent and hassle free. You can even stream media from the external hard drive, with no loss of audio or picture quality; data transfer is very reliable too. I tried other brand names and they get much hotter and are at least twice as noisy. In few words: a great value for your money. |
Reliably Good
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| Review Date: December 20, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Experteo, Siloam Springs, AR USA |
| I got this about 2 months ago and it has run without a hitch. The fan is not as loud as some people claim. Maybe they were earlier models or something. In my opinion, this fan is relatively quiet and that's speaking from the perspective of it being on in a small quiet dorm room. One thing for sure is that this drive has two 500 GB hard drives inside (actually each drive is 466 GB or something, but that's marketing for you). I mainly keep this off most of the time and just turn it on for backing up my 500 GB Western Digital External Hard Drive and my laptop as well. I actually managed to catch this for sale at $130 after watching the price for 8 months. $65 per 500 GB hard drive is a steal compared to all the other 500 GB hard drives out there. In time there will be better deals, but this hard drive has been good for me. Remember people, always have a backup of all your data because you never know when you hard drive will fail after at least 1 year of constant use. |
lots o' space
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| Review Date: December 24, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Bill Rankin, |
| 1 TB of potential storage. Actually it's two disks, initially set up to mirror each other, in case one disk bites the dust. In that configuration, you get "only" 500 GB of storage capacity, but a little more security. You can reconfigure it to use the full 1 TB if so desired. A little noisy, but since I use it only for backup, that's not much of an issue. The package didn't come with the instructions for reconfiguration, but a call to customer support quickly remedied that. |
Good low cost backup storage
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| Review Date: November 14, 2007 |
| Reviewer: electronics_buyer212, |
| Nice cheap plentiful backup storage. I recommend it for this kind of use. I wouldn't use it as primary storage because the fan is very loud. There's a manual on-off switch to control the fan but it's not clear if the drives will or will not overheat if the fan is turned off, so I leave it on to be safe. |
Great Product - Poor Company
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| Review Date: April 5, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Akhil Sharma, USA |
| I bought this product a few days back. And when I connected it, the laptop didn't recognize it. It was able to show the new hardware but no disks were being shown. I knew that the disks inside are inserted without the initial formatting. I called customer care and they asked me to open it and check the disk... It seems, warranty sticker doesn't mean anything... after opening it and formatting the drives one by one it is working good... it has got western digital hard drives inside... i liked the product overall... the company Cavalry should improve upon the process so that they don't commit mistakes. if somebody says their drives failed they should blame western digital and not cavalry... it is not much noisy as lot of people complain.... got for 190 bucks and it is a good price for a this purchase..... |
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