Home > Consumer Reviews > AcomData HD500UFAPE5-72 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0/FireWire A Combo

I bought a 250 GB drive about a year 1 1/2 ago. It ran ok until one day the drive started making noise and stopped working the next day. I contacted AcomData but they never returned by emails. Took the drive to have the data extracted. The data recover company said the drive is formatted in a strange way. Said it would cost $1250 to recover the data if they are able to do it at all.
AcomData sucks. Buy at your own risk.

This was my second purchase of an AcomData Firewire drive. Both are quiet and cool and fast enough for my purposes. I use one only for backup of music files and the other for cloning my main Mac hard drive once or twice a month (alternating with a 5-yr-old LaCie drive). Used this way they should last a long time. I think AcomData drives, at Amazon prices, are good bargains.

it is a good product it gets a little warm and shuts off but other wise
its great. I have a smaller one of the same thing and its great.

i did quite a bit of shopping & comparing before i decided on an external hard drive & i couldn't figure out why the 320 gig model that is very similar to this cost more & had many reviews where this one had none. then i saw that this model came out later than the other one & as we all know, technology is the only thing that gets less expensive. after doing some research on the manufacturer's website i decided to get this one despite what they say about drives as big as 500 gigs being a little less reliable. i baby my computers & have a history of having them last forever & i just couldn't see paying more & getting less. this one is the most bang for buck, especially for a firewire/usb combo.

so far it works great, it got up & running quickly with no problem & transfers data rapidly. i am using it on the firewire bus on my macbook, don't let the tag "firewire a" throw you, that just means you can use either the 6-pin or the 4-pin cable. i like the metal case & it doesn't run hot. it comes ready to roll but i reformatted it to optimize for mac which only took a moment. the only discrepancy is that the manufacturer claims that you can make this drive bootable on a mac by installing osx on it but osx tells me differently when i try to do that. i am not using the backup software supplied with it because i am informed that it is flaky. of course the real test will be how long it lasts & if i have problems i will update my review but so far this unit is a solid quality item @ a very good price.

I bought this about two years ago and it has been on constantly since then. No fan, but does not get hot, all heat is dissipated by the very heavy aluminum enclosure. Could t noget the firewire to work well, but the USB works fine. The new eSATA Acoms are dynamite, I've read a number of reviews around the web and they are consistently rated 5 stars.