OWC drives to include HD SpeedTools

Other World Computing (OWC), which offers a variety of FireWire storage drives, says that beginning immediately, all OWC Mercury FireWire drives will ship with a free copy of Hard Drive SpeedTools 3.5, a hard drive management utility from Intech.

The software accelerates OWC’s Mercury FireWire drives’ performance drives by as much as 20 percent compared to other drive management software programs, according to Larry O’Connor, founder and president of OWC. With SpeedTools, “several” of the company’s Mercury FireWire models are now able to provide sustained data transfer rates of more than 40 Megabytes per second, he added.

SpeedTools sports disk configuration capabilities and testing features. It features a built-in “Precision Driver” technology that will automatically build a custom-device driver for individual Macs and operating systems.

SpeedTools is compatible with Mac OS 7.0 through 9.2.x. And SpeedTools 3.5 introduces two new utilities, Integrity X and QuickBench X, which are designed exclusively for Mac OS X. As of HDST 3.5, ATA-6 drives of up to 2048GB connected to the built-in ATA bus are supported while running the Classic (OS 9.X and earlier) versions of Mac OS. However, as of Mac OS X 10.1.3, these same drives are not supported past the old 128GB limit. However, there’s some online guidance for dealing with the disparity.

In addition to improving OWC’s Mercury FireWire storage performance, version 3.5 fully supports all ATA and SCSI disk storage devices. Other features include one-step disk setup and configuration, a simple user interface, and testing and benchmarking capabilities.

Although all of OWC’s Mercury FireWire drives are pre-configured with SpeedTools software, end-users can also reformat OWC’s drives with alternate utilities.

OWC customers who’ve purchased OWC Mercury FireWire drives within the past 90 days can get SpeedTools for US$10 by calling 800-275-4576 (be sure and have your invoice number available).