Tagline: Fun, Funky, SERIOUS Storage Since DrFaulken has done a couple of reviews of external hard drive enclosures, I thought I would give it a go with my latest purchase of a Western Digital Lighted Extreme Series II 250GB Hard Drive. The twist is that while he reviewed enclosures where you add a separately acquired hard drive, I ended up chosing an all in one solution with some flair (re: some extra, unnecessary lights). This was done primarily because the price differential between buying the enclosure and drive separately vs. together doesn’t seem to be as great as I at least remember it used to be. I got this external hard drive from NewEgg for $120 where as an internal WD 250 GB SATA drive goes for $70 and a good enclosure costs about $40. I also don’t have any need to change the drive out unless it fails. Also, lets face it, I like blinky lights. For full effect, I am writing this review with only the Harbor Breeze 52″ Neon Light Ceiling Fan, the Western Digital and the 20″ iMac providing illumination (though I think the iMac is providing most of the actual illumination).

Packaging: The box it comes in is fairly non-descript and functional. The drive comes with everything you see here including USB and Firewire 400 cables as well as the power supply and power cable.

Installation: Like all modern external drives being connected to modern OSes (Windows 98 is dead folks) installation is a no brainer. Because I am using this exclusively on the aforementioned iMac, I decided to repartition the drive with the Mac OS Extended file system, but it came pre-formated with FAT32 which should be sufficient for most Windows users.

Blinky Lights: Not only does the hard drive have a button for the drive power, but it has a separate button for the glowies which is referred to as the “color select button”. The lights on the hard drive can operate regardless if the drive itself is powered on or off. Tapping the color select button cycles between the three on modes of kaleidoscope slow and fast where the color tubes cycle through the normal spectrum of color and fixed color mode of whatever color the tubes are when you enter the mode. Holding the button for 3 seconds turns off the light tubes as well as the super bright blue LEDs leaving only the much smaller/darker on and access indicators on. I recorded a short video of the kaleidoscope mode in action or you can see it more professionally captured in Flash on Western Digital’s site.

Conclusions: Besides the blinky lights that please me, this seems to be a rather standard external drive. The drive has a noticeable but not annoying hum while its in operation, but it goes to sleep after five minutes or so. In sleep mode, the drive doesn’t make any noise at all with or without the lights on. The drive only comes with a year warrenty, which kind of sucks. Further more, after a brief inspection, I am not sure how I would go about getting into the case should the original drive fail and I would want to install another drive inside. So thats a bit of a bummer, but since it was only $120 its not that big of a deal.