I just bought a 1TB external hard drive from SimpleTech / Fabrik, and it is the worst piece of garbage imaginable.
Firstly, the drive comes pre-formatted for PC, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s formatted read-only, so to use it for ANYTHING I have to completely erase the drive.
Secondly, when attempting to erase the drive with Disk Utility, something about the drive makes the erase operation fail. I tried MS-DOS FAT, which seemed to work, before giving me an error upon trying to use it. Formatting to Mac Extended gives an error immediately.
I’m just considering myself fortunate that I don’t need this in the next few hours.
UPDATE: oddly, someone from SimpleTech saw my posting and sent me a personal email. She apologized for my experience and I sent her some notes. Apparently there is a separate product line that the same company makes which is meant for Mac called G-Technology.
I ended up getting something on special from Fry’s mail order, a 1TB “FreeAgent Pro” from Seagate. The funny thing about this one is it has a glowing bar on it that serves absolutely no purpose other than looking like a prop from a 1980’s sci-fi movie. It does not have a Firewire 800 interface (the SimpleTech one did), which is a bummer, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.
My files are copying now; it’s around 400GB which will take something like 6 hours to duplicate.
