I had to send my 17" PB in for warranty service within 10 days of it's expirations. I needed to backup my data and went to FNAC in Milan. I had planned on getting a full size 80GB or 160 GB FW Lacie Porsche but they were amazingly out. The only other option was a Maxtor 1 touch 250GB with an enoumous price tag. So my decision was based on urgent necessity. The only FW model they had was the LaCie Porsche Mobile 40GB, 4200, 2MB, FW/USB Combo. I had copied about 17GB of data from my 17" to my friend's Lacie USB 160GB in case I couldn't find a suitable drive. I dropped off my PB at the service center and bought my external drive the next day. I wanted to set this up as a boot drive using my trusty ol Ti500Mhz 10GB 512MB which my wife uses running Jaguar.
The box includes the drive, a 6 to 6 FW cable and USB cable, plus a USB power cable for non bus powered iLink ports I guess, a CD with drivers and their backup utilty. The drive itself has 1 FW, 1 USB, the power port on the back and writing indicator on the front. The size is 1.5" longer, 1" wider and 1/8th" thicker than an iPod Mini but the same weight, and it's color is slightly darker than a Ti PB. Plugging it into FW it of course works fine on bus power and was immediately recognized. The drive was in FAT32 so I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended. I installed Panther with English, Italian and Japanese, all iLife apps, and xCode. The whole process took less than 2 hours. Ran all the updates to 10.3.8 without a hitch. Booting from the drive is fast but peformance is slow but acceptable with half second menu delay, clicks, etc. That evening I took it over to my friend's to recover my data. We booted his powerbook with it by holding down the option key. Copying my 17GB took from 5 to 7 minutes, can't remember exactly.
My only peeve with it so far is noise, it doesn't whine, but occasionally clicks like trickling water and "chink chiooncks" like sounds coming from R2D2. I have subsequently renamed it R2D2. Overall it's serving it's purpose at acceptable speeds as a temporary boot disk. Bus powered is really nice and it's portablility is going to come in handy.
I want to put a larger and faster drive in their in the near future, either a 60GB 7200 or 80GB 5400 and put the old 40GB in my wife's Tibook. I saw a thread here on how to open the full size Porsches but nothing on the mobile and they are different. Anyone try this? If not, I'll be doing it anyway but a walk through is always nice. Looks like there are four tiny holes with releases on each corner of the bottom and that's similar to the full size's start points.
Also if anyone has any of the faster RPM/Cached Mobiles how are they? And do you get the same noises?
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