OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire+USB 2.0

The OWC Mercury Elite is a high quality hard drive, designed for use with media applications. I used to have one of these hard drives - a 250 GB sized one, but it has since departed, which I will get into later. I was recommended these hard drives by a former colleague when I first decided a number of years ago that I needed an external drive for transporting my Pro Tools files from place to place. While it wasn't the cheapest hard drive on the market, it definitely wasn't over priced and seemed to be pretty high quality and up in the range with LaCie and other name brand drives. The Mercury Elite has connections for both Firewire and USB 2.0. It comes in a very sturdy casing and with all of the accessories that you would expect from an external hard drive. Until the point that the hard drive died after a few years of use, I really didn't have any issues with it. It always mounted perfectly and didn't present me with any problems at all. It seemed to run at a high speed and was always capable of doing the work that I asked it to do. The only reason that it died was really my fault. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I somehow burned out the external casing and had to take out the hard drive from the inside. To my surprise, when I put the drive into another external casing, everything was still in tact! This was a pleasant surprise, as in general I really don't trust any hard drive, no matter how well built it is. However, the OWC Mercury Elite is definitely as well built of a hard drive as you can get for pro audio and video. They aren't as expensive as a Glyph, and although they are a step below them in terms of quality, if you're looking for a very well made drive but don't want to spend too much money, the OWC Mercury Elite is definitely one that I would recommend checking out.