External hard drives have the distinct advantage that you don't need to break into your PC to install them. With XP and Vista both happy to recognise and work with a USB-linked drive, you can even hot-plug them. What you don't get however, is the speed of a SATA drive, unless you go for Hypertec's new dual-interface Firestorm product.

This 80GB, 3.5-inch hard drive (versions up to 1TB are also available) comes neatly packaged in an extruded aluminium case with black highlights, though it's a shame the black block power supply couldn't have been built into its paperback-sized case.

The two LEDs on the front panel - blue for power and green for drive activity - need to be viewed through smoked glass, or you risk yellowy after-images from their intensity. Other than that, the drive is a soundly built piece of kit.

Billed as hot-pluggable, this is only true if you use the USB 2 connection. With eSATA you need to switch off, connect (or disconnect) the drive and switch on again. Although the Firestorm is automatically recognised by Windows, unplugging it while the PC was on hung our system solid.

Hypertec supplies two applications with the drive: SyncBack and TrueCrypt. SyncBack is a comprehensive backup product which includes synchronisation between PCs, optional data compression and incremental backups.

TrueCrypt is 256-bit on-the-fly encryption, which can create virtual encrypted drives or encrypt a physical partition or whole drive. According to its home site, it provides two levels of ‘plausible deniability' and can create hidden volumes using steganography - phew! A TrueCrypt encrypted volume is indistinguishable from random data, apparently.

We tried reading and writing a 5GB basket of 1KB to 1GB mixed files using both the USB 2 and eSATA connections. The data was uncompressed and unencrypted. As you can see from the table, the eSATA link is between 50 percent and 250 percent faster than USB 2 and performs close to the speed of an internal SATA drive.

The Firestorm drive is very quiet in use and you won't need to hide it away because of irritating clicks or whirrs. It'll sit happily next to a desktop PC, though it's a bit big to carry around for use with a laptop; Hypertec also makes 2.5-inch external drives for use with notebooks.

Verdict
This is a solid external drive, well made and with an impressive turn of speed. It would be handy as a portable device, to work with at full eSATA speed at its home site, and still be available via USB 2 on just about any modern PC. Just don't point the evil blue LED eye at anybody you like.

Company: Hypertec

Contact: 0870 243 5603

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