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It might have been designed to sit alongside an Apple MacBook, but the Freecom Mobile Drive Mg will work on any PC or laptop with a USB port. The magnesium finish looks great and feels reassuringly solid – it should protect the 750GB hard disk from a few scrapes.
Since this external hard drive is aimed primarily at Mac users, it comes formatted in the OS X-compatible HFS+ file system. To use it with Windows, you’ll need to reformat it to a file system Microsoft’s operating system can recognise. We were a little surprised that an external disk aimed at Mac owners featured USB3 connectivity, as the format isn’t currently supported on any Apple device. It’s better news for anyone that has a Windows-based PC will benefit from significantly faster file transfer speeds, as long as they have the appropriate ports.
On our USB3-equipped PC, the Mobile Drive Mg managed 102.3MB/s write and 66.8MB/s read speeds in the large file transfer test, which is slightly above average. Small files were written at 33.4MB/s and read at 42.4MB/s, which again is middle of the road. These results are mainly due to the slower 5,400RPM hard disk, but performance was still reasonable for a 2½in external disk.
As is the case with most Apple accessories, the Mobile Drive Mg carries a noticeable price premium over other external hard disks. The Freecom Mobile Drive Classic 3.0 has faster transfer speeds and a larger capacity for around £25 less. It’s clearly the better choice.
