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solid construction, small form factor, excellent product

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.

Update (5/20/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, Cavalry Storage CADB-U32 Series 2 TB USB 2-bay JBOD Personal Disk Array CADB002U32 Electronics, was written by buru buru piggu.

The average rating for this item is 4.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.