Review: Voyager Q
by Robert Mohns
(May 4, 2009)
Overview
Plummeting hard drive prices and the widespread adoption of the SATA
interface have combined to create a new type of product, the "drive
dock", which connects any number of inexpensive bare hard drives to
your Mac as easily as docking an iPod. In comparison to external
drive enclosures, these devices have proven to be especially
convenient for computer troubleshooting, testing and, perhaps most of
all, cost-effective backup, where you pop in high-capacity,
high-performance drives instead of slow tapes or optical cartridges.
Newer Technology designed its Voyager Q ("Quad") drive dock,
distributed by Other World Computing, to accept laptop (2.5-inch) and
desktop (3.5-inch) SATA drives that then connect to your computer via
any of its four different storage interfaces: external SATA (eSATA),
FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0.
Externally, the Voyager looks like a sci-fi toaster, complete with
lever-tab on the front and a big slot on top. But instead of a slice
of bread, you pop in a bare hard drive. A spring-loaded panel on top,
with a cutout, helps you line up a laptop drive, or folds down out of
the way when you insert a desktop drive. A circular blue light on the
front panel indicates power, blinking red during disk activity. The
base is weighted and has rubber feet to keep from sliding around a
desk. Overall, the Voyager seems quite robust.
Connect your choice of cable to the back (one of each type is
included in the box), then turn on the Voyager by pressing the power
button below the eject button. USB and FireWire support hot swapping
- unmount the drive from the Mac's desktop, power off the dock, then
press the front lever to pop the drive up, and pop in another drive.
The Voyager must be turned off before switching between interfaces.
It appears to activate the first port you connect after it turns on,
ignoring the others.
Using eSATA may require rebooting your Mac to mount and unmount
drives, although some eSATA cards and drivers may support
hot-swapping.
The Voyager's eSATA bridge looks to a Mac Pro like any other SATA
device, but adds "eSATA-2" to the drive's model identifier. In System
Profiler, our test drive was transformed from model "ST3400620AS" to
"eSATA-2 ST3400620AS". We also noticed that the Voyager does not
support NCQ (native command queueing), a performance-enhancing but
optional SATA feature.
Otherworld Computing tell us the Voyager's bridge chipset been tested
with volumes up to 8 terabytes. The SATA spec includes 48-bit LBA
drive mode, supporting volumes up to 144 petabytes (over 150 million
gigabytes). The Voyager should support growing drive capacities for
quite some time.
...
http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/voyagerq/
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