The Freecom Data Tank has won the iF Award, one of the world’s most prestigious design awards. The Data Tank is an aluminium box with black plastic front and back. It carries two hard drives --in my test version there were two 250GB disks, for a total of 500GB. The Data Tank also has a ventilator to keep things cool, software to change the device’s configuration, and an encryption system that enables you to keep data secure. It connects to the computer by FireWire 800, FireWire 400, or USB 2.

The Data Tank is a nice performing external data storage unit. It doesn’t just look good. Before we jump right in, let’s first take a look at Freecom. Freecom has been in business for some considerable time. In the past, the company made nice-looking external CD- and DVD-burners that performed well, but which did not look extravagantly good. In short, Freecom was an OEM company as there are so many in the world.

Since a year, Freecom has become more dynamic with a keen eye for excellence. This translates in carefully designed products using the best components. An example of this is the ventilator that sits inside the Data Tank. Ventilators make noise --we’re all very aware of that fact. The hard disk itself makes noise too. Add these two sources of noise together and you potentially end up with a device that can hardly be used because of stress levels going through the roof.

Ball-bearing Ventilator, Quiet

Since over a year, I have a LaCie Two Big --an aluminium chassis holding two disks and no (!) ventilator. The Two Big starts quiet, but after half an hour the disks start to make the typical noise that comes from electronic parts that run at their limit temperature.

I feared for the worse when the Data Tank arrived. On unpacking, I was immediately struck by the care with which this product has been packed, but packaging often means little with regards to a product’s working behaviour. The ventilator inside the Data Tank is described as “ball-bearing”, but even this couldn’t convince me as I’d read this before and still “enjoyed” deafening sound levels when a device has been running permanently for some time.

It was a nice surprise therefore to turn on the Data Tank and hear… nothing. After a quarter of an hour, I could hear a low-pitched rumbling. When I checked the ventilator it wasn’t running. After half an hour I started worrying whether the thing was perhaps broken (DOA?), but when three quarters of an hour after startup the ventilator was finally running, I still couldn’t hear it.

Conclusion from this chain of events: Freecom has equipped the Data Tank with a temperature sensor that makes the ventilator spin only when it is necessary, and the ventilator itself must be of high enough quality not to be heard. Even after testing the device with Prosoft’s Backup 3 (soon to be reviewed) for several hours in a row, the Data Tank only rumbles, but is still quiet enough not to interfere with your work or driving you nuts.

High FireWire 800 Speed

How does the Data Tank perform? In terms of speed, the Data Tank performs very well, when used with FireWire 800. The device has the Oxford chip on board, so performance is as fast as technically possible. On a Power Mac G5, this translates in speeds that never exceed the 70MB/sec mark, due to the clumsy way Apple implemented the FireWire bus. Still, 70MB/sec is enough for video-editing purposes, currently among the most performance demanding application.

As with most of these external disk subsystems, the size of the files has a large impact on performance, with small-to-medium sized files being throughput at a much higher pace than large files exceeding several Megabytes.

Performance is not the only thing you should take into account with the Data Tank. You can configure the Data Tank as a JBOD device (Just a Bunch of Disks), a RAID 0 and a RAID 1 device. RAID 1 is mirroring and in theory the most secure mode, while RAID 0 is Striping, the fastest mode.

Configuring the Data Tank means setting it up in one of these modes. Here, Freecom has provided in a Java utility that allows you to set the mode using a simple GUI. In my opinion, this should have been made more robust. When there are other FireWire devices hooked up to the FireWire bus, the Java application complains and tells you you should disconnect those devices --even when these are DVD-burners!