Dear Editor,

I have worked in IT Support for the last 9 years and have been using computers for the last 25 years. Over the years, I have relied on PC World and other publications for their wealth of information, and feel that your magazine is one of the better publications that I read. However, I must say that after reading the September 2005 issue, I was surprisingly angry… angry enough to write this long-winded letter.

What made me angry was the obvious bias that must occur when deciding what products to review and write articles about. Specifically, what I am referring to is your article entitled "Big-Drive Backups". Obviously I realize that you cannot write about every product out there because of time and space limitations, as well as the fact that there are so many products out there. Unfortunately, whether it is by coincidence or design, one thing is obvious to me. Out of the five “Single PC” drives reviewed, three of them are from the big-names in desktop storage. If Hitachi sold their drive in an external chassis, I would expect that either Iomega or Hammer’s product would have been bumped from your list.

You sold a half-page advertisement for Apricorn's external drive solutions that ran on Page 40 of the same issue of PC World, yet omit them from your review. In fact, I am unable to find a single reference online that PC World has ever reviewed the EZ Bus product, which falls into the “Single PC” category that you rate this type of product in. If you’re more than willing to sell a company advertising space, shouldn’t you also give them the professional courtesy of reviewing their products? Even if the product wasn’t as good as I truly believe it is, you owe it to your readers to let them know if the products you are helping manufacturers market are worth the money that your subscribers would be paying for such a product.

In my career, I have worked with numerous drives and enclosures and look at the drives from a different angle than Alan Stafford and William Wang. They seem to base their reviews on specifications, performance and software bundles. I look at these same types of devices from the angle of reliability, heat dissipation, ambient noise, warranty policies, ease of obtaining support, and so-forth.

Since the reviewers admit that drives perform better when formatted with the NTFS file system, the end-user could easily convert their volume to NTFS from FAT32 if they wanted to. This begs the question, why penalize manufacturers for this? They made their decisions from a marketing standpoint to make it easier for their users to use the FAT32 file system to make it more ‘universal’ so they can use the drive on their older machines or machines running a different operating system such as Mac OS X. Personally, even though I have all of my drives formatted with the NTFS file system, I can understand why they’d want to ship their products as FAT32. After all, users of Windows XP can format a drive as NTFS easily but have to use third-party utilities if they wanted to move the drive to a FAT32 file system. In my opinion, if they want to rate these products on the same playing field, they should have converted the file system to NTFS on all of the drives first.

With regard to penalizing drive manufacturers for including a less than stellar software bundle with their hardware, I can see some merit in this. However, it all boils down to economics; drive manufacturers do not want to exclude backup software since some people will use it, but since a lot of people never use the bundled software, how much should they invest in licensing a product to include in their package that may never get used? After all, it does drive up the total cost of the unit unnecessarily. Rating the drive based on this sends a message that the drive may be sub-par when it is of little fault of the manufacturer.

Additionally, just because a company manufacturers hard drives does not mean they know a lot about enclosures. For instance, Maxtor (who is at the bottom of your list for a lousy software bundle and FAT32 file system) builds their chassis in a fashion that not only does not dissipate heat very well, but is extremely difficult to work with when the chassis fails but the hard drive must be recovered. They not only have an excessive number of screws to remove, with one covered by a “warranty void if removed” sticker, the actual hard drive is mounted to a “shield” that has tape around all four sides. This creates frustration on several levels for me. First of all, the design of using plastic for an enclosure baffles me since plastic is a good insulator. Then they put tape that covers both the shield and the drive that cannot be removed without a lot of effort. What does this tape actually “add” to their design except make it obvious to them that the customer had taken apart the unit? Additionally, why should my warranty be voided on a chassis because I want to save the data on my hard drive? After all, if I buy a typical 3.5” drive that goes inside of my computer, taking the case off of my computer does not void that warranty or the hard drive’s warranty, so why should this be any different?

Although I realize that companies are not liable for the data loss, they should not make it difficult for their customers to try to salvage the data and penalize them for doing it. If there is a problem with the product within the warranty period, the drive manufacturer should accommodate such situations. Unlike Maxtor, if a drive from Apricorn ceases to function, they actually request you to take off the lid of the chassis and give them the information from the drive itself. Additionally, they have no problem with you removing the drive from the chassis and sending it out for data recovery to a reputable company such as Drive Savers and then reassembling the drive for warranty replacement. That is a good sign of good customer service and a warranty that protects both parties, rather than penalizes the user for something wrong in the manufacturer’s design.

I must also question the rationale for giving the Iomega Desktop drive third place. There’s absolutely nothing “special” about this drive except for the itty-bitty fan that is located on the rear of the drive that is not much bigger than my thumb. This fan moves so little air that I could not even determine if the fan blows air onto the IDE connector or sucks out hot air from the chassis. If you cannot identify the airflow, it is probably not a very efficient design. Additionally, although the reviewers mention that the software that comes with this drive allows for the backing up of changed files, the application isn’t very intuitive and has a lousy interface.

With regard to the Western Digital drive that you ranked as your number 1 contender, I believe that this drive is overly bulky. Additionally, its plastic chassis uses a passive cooling scheme with vents on either side of the physical drive, rather than the active cooling design that Apricorn uses. Sure, the drive comes with media card slots and a 2-port USB hub, but these little additions really aren’t enough to make me recommend it to my clients over a more polished backup device. After all, we’re talking about backup devices, not all-in-one multifunction devices here.

Please be aware that even though I whole-heartedly believe in Apricorn’s products, use them personally, and recommend them exclusively to my clients, I am not an employee of theirs, do not sell their products or make any profit from their sales. I am just someone who has taken the time to evaluate offerings from various companies, including not only the Western Digital, Maxtor and Iomega products evaluated in your article, but also Edge Technologies, Iogear, Ximeta and Acomdata’s products of the same type. To me, Apricorn clearly has a superior design with a case made out of aluminum, instead of plastic. Plus, they have designed the case with a slim-profile fan that provides enough ventilation to adequately cool the drive, extending its life expectancy beyond that of the other drives I have tested. Although I have seen several failures of Edge Technology’s drive and one from Ximeta, I have never seen a drive in an Apricorn chassis fail even though I know of many more of them in use.

With regard to your rating of the various software applications bundled with the drives, I will admit that I have not tried all of them and accept that some of them may deserve the rating that your reviewers give them. However, they gave StompSoft’s “BackUp My PC 2005” 3.5 stars. Unless StompSoft has done some major rewriting in its 2005 version, if a drive fails, you have to rebuild the entire O/S from scratch, reinstall their software, and then recovery your individual files. If this program warrants that good of a rating, the software provided by Apricorn definitely deserves 4.5 stars, with the full version of the application, known as Acronis True Image 8, deserving a full 5 stars. This program even received a 4-star rating from Jon L. Jacobi in the November 2004 issue of your magazine, which is as good as anything in your review, including the Number 1 application, EMC Dantz Retrospect Professional 7 at almost half the cost. It clones, creates images, and lets you do selective file restoration. What more could you want?

If you have any interest, I would be willing to submit full reviews of both of these products to PC World to give these products the coverage that they truly deserve. If not, I would still appreciate acknowledgement of receipt of this letter.