You pay an average of 17 percent more for a 32 percent boost in speed. When you add it up long-term, the time saved is worth that extra money. Plus, those two drives had only average or below-average scores on the majority of the tests. Your drive should include a complete set of support materials, including a formatting utility, an updated driver, cables, and manuals for both software and hardware. All the drives reviewed here include the necessary cables plus a five-year warranty.
Every drive comes with a disk-formatting utility.
The two utilities that were more of a hassle to use were MicroNet's DiskWorks 3.2.5 and La Cie's Silverlining 5.8.1. We don't recommend switching utilities, because we found slight discrepancies in test results when different utilities were used. A few of the drives we tested, notably the APS drives and the La Cie D2, come with excellent documentation. But some drives, such as those from D.C. World Connections and Direct Source, have only decent software documentation but none for the hardware. And some, such as MacProducts' Magic Ultrastar 2XP, have little or no documentation at all.