hi

I'd be interested in hearing any experiences with Xcar�t Pro 99 internal media bay drives? Power consumption, noise levels, speed (DV!) etc.

tia,

jOn * http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~jon

I just bought an Xcaret Pro 99 18GB expansion bay drive for my Lombard. To install, you just slip it into the empty bay, and the drive comes right up on your desktop. It's very quiet, and not at all annoying even in a completely silent room. It powers down after inactivity like it should, and it powers down immediately if you drag the drive into the trash.

The Battery control panel usually says I have 3:25 left right after unplugging when I just have the CD-ROM installed. When the Xcaret drive is installed and running, I notice it says 3:05 typically. Not sure if I would get back up to 3:25 when the drive powers down.

Speed-wise, I have no numbers, but it has been fine for capturing DV and writing back to DV cam. No dropped frames at all even with 333MHz.

Best of all, it doesn't have the annoying ker-chuck ker-chuck ker-chuck! sound that the internal Lombard drives make every once in a while.

[kbacon]

My 18GB Xcaret works great. My only gripe was that when formatted you really only get 16.89 GB capacity! This is due to MCE and Toshiba saying that 1000MB=1GB when its really 1024MB=1GB. I say we should have truth in advertising with hard drives so we know exactly what the usable capacity of drive is.

By the way I also decided I wanted to swap the 18GB expansion drive with the internal 6GB drive that came with my Lombard. This worked fine with a minimal effort for the swap.