Review: Sabio DM2-PT External Drive
Price: $249 for 1TB model and $449 for the 2TB drive.
Specs: Full specifications here.
Intro
The external hard drive market gets more interesting by the day and one of newer introductions from a company called Sabio recently landed on our desk for a look-see.
Before we get into this drive’s particulars we’ll take a second to, once again, stress the importance of backing up your precious still image and video files. As the files from your digital life continue to pileup, simply dumping them in a folder on your computer’s hard drive is a recipe for disaster. Having gone through several hard drive crashes I can tell you first hand that losing once-in-lifetime image and video files is a devastating experience. Thanks to the myriad offerings in the external, portable hard drive market today it’s also now completely avoidable as well. Our advice: don’t wait til your computer’s drive crashes – pick up an external hard drive today and start backing up your files now. Enough said on that front. (For more details on how to back-up your images, read our four simple steps.)
As for the aforementioned Sabio DM2-PT it was certainly one of the lightest externals we’ve ever tested, checking in at just about 1 lb. and its rugged aluminum outer casing (and included slip case) provide some solid protection against an accidental drop.
Sabio has incredibly managed to fit a dual-disc RAID array into a 6-inch square package offering the DM2-PT in capacities of 1TB and 2TB. The unit also has a trio of connectivity options with ports for eSATA, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0. Another nice touch is the fact Sabo has added a second FireWire 800 port so the device can be daisy-chained together off of a single host port for additional back-up and/or file sharing.
We experienced extremely fast transfer speeds using the eSATA port and will confidently say the promised read performance of 115 MB/sec was easily achieved. When you’re dealing with 2TB of space and copying over large still and video files speed matters a great deal and with the DM2-PT you’re not spending much time at all waiting for files to copy over.
The drive also handled simultaneous playback of multiple streams of HD video in real time – a nice performance feature as we’ve played with a few externals that couldn’t make this claim.
Set up is a snap as well – simply connect the drive to your PC or Mac using one of the included cables (package includes USB, FireWire 800 and eSATA cables) and you’re ready to begin copying files over. The DM2-PT is also compatible with Apple’s Time Machine auto back-up program.
What We Liked
Along with the lightweight from factor, the speed of file transfers is a big plus with Sabio’s DM2-PT. The addition of that second FireWire port is a nice touch as well.
What We Didn’t Like
Though fairly compact it would be nice to be able to stand the drive on it’s side so it takes up less room on the desktop – a vertical stand/holder would have been a smart extra in the box.
Bottom Line:
A very cut and dry storage solution that’s easy to use and ready to go right out of the box.
