In the dock
With prices starting at £65 for the 250GB disk and rising up to £109 for the 640GB edition, the CLS series is not exactly cheap. In fact, I would say it’s rather expensive for USB 2.0 storage. If you take a look through the rest of Freecom’s product catalogue, you’ll find the Mobile Drive XXS, which is almost identical and is, on average, £10 cheaper for each available capacity. The drive dock is an additional £15 but having it makes more sense of the whole CLS idea.
Not the fastest, but delivers off the shelf convenience
Verdict
For those unlikely to be shuffling multiple archives in a handy hub and simply need an external USB drive, there are plenty of other more reasonably priced drives on the market, which offer similar or better performance. Yet, as a concept, Freecom’s Mobile Drive CLS storage options offer something a bit different, more akin to cartridge drives of old. Portability aside, the convenience of mounting multiple drives is really aimed at users who aren’t fussed about performance and don’t mind spending a bit more on something that simply works and makes a case for some good old-fashioned values. ®
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Freecom Mobile Drive CLS storage
COMMENTS
Data recovery option?!
Having had a good laugh... (Or in other words having sworn a lot) at Seagate's piss-poor service of
"If your drive breaks we'll send you one we've fixed, if you want your data recovered it'll be 600 quid, and if you use any other recovery vendor we won't even give you a second hand drive." This £25 quid option sounds like it has been extended from god himself as an olive branch to remind me what wonders await repentant sinners in heaven.
25 quid for a three year waranty on drives I'll use for intermediate term archiving is a damn good deal! Admittedly I'd need more that 1 in 8 to fail before it was better value than disklabs, but still, nice that they've seen a customer wish and are filling it!
See first post, my post.
"However, I can heartily recommend the Mobile Drive XXS with their rubber cases, quite tough little things and has survived a few waist height falls to the floor."
Not an official test by any means but I'd sooner it be in that rubber case, which if nothing else helps to spread and dampen the impact with the floor, than without.
Protective rubber bits - and I'm not talking condoms...
This idea about providing a moderate level of protection because the corners are rounded off and enclosed in rubber, it's nonsense.
Why is it nonsense? If you're not sure whether the device will survive the fall to the ground, then the fact it has bits of added rubber are irrelevant, you have to treat the device as if it would become damaged, you have to treat it with great care. Which means you're going to have to treat the device as if it had NO protection at all, which then defeats the object of having the bits of rubber and the extra price that goes with that.
Either it's been subjected to drop testing and passed or it hasn't. If it hasn't been subject to drop testing at all then you might as well forget it has the extra protective bits added.
Hang on, this is brilliant
We are always being told to backup, backup, backup. And the safest backup is to a disk that is not connected to a computer (an preferably on-site). So at the moment I have a lot of old 3.5 in hard drives in a cupboard gathering dust. So they're basically charging an extra £10 for a dust jacket and labelling system. Fair enough. I'll take 2, please.
I quite like this idea...
but I would want 2Tb+ 3.5 inch drives with a powered dock. This combined with a non-networked media player would be just up my street.
Would be ideal for long term storage of series etc - disc not spinning = longer data storage
Even better would be for them to sell hard case + skin and let you add your own drives
