Design Features

Hammer really put some thought into the silver and black morespace design. In addition to leaving out the noisy fan, the drive has an on/off switch, which I prefer on my drives. This means you don’t have to unplug cables, but just flip the switch. You can also stack the drives to save valuable desk space. My perfect desk would have three of these drives, so that I can store different types of media (photos, music, and video) and no longer have to search through backup DVDs. You can also orient the drive vertically or horizontally.

The most considerate feature is the status light. The bright blue LED points towards the base across the bottom of the drive, instead of shining in your eyes, as with most drive lights. This little feature ensures no lights distract you while gaming or editing photos.


morespace Front

I also want to note that Hammer Storage does not engage in any deceptive marketing. The marketing materials correctly claim this is a great drive to use for backups and storage for home and office, they don’t suggest anywhere to use it to edit video or music, as I’ve seen with other USB drives. Generally, you don’t want to use USB drives to feed media files while editing because they don’t deliver the bits and bytes continuously, as a FireWire drive does.

ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup

Before you reformat your new drive, there are a few items on the drive that you might interest you, so copy these files first. There are a number files for PC users and PDF files to help the Mac user with your new drive. Of value is a copy of ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Backup application. This interesting program lets you back up in four different ways.


The first option: Photo, Video, Music back up, backs up your media files as one big back up or incrementally (since the last back up). A second choice is to fully or incrementally back up your photo, video, music, email, MS Office, finance, Act!, Safari favorites, Internet Explorer favorites and/or web page files. The software gives you an opportunity to add new categories.

The third option is to back up selective folders. This is handy if you save your work in different topic-oriented folders, such as a Back Up folder, a This Week folder, or an Acme Trucking Folder. You can choose to back up one or a number of folders.

The fourth option is for those who forget to backup their files. You can schedule a backup with any of the above options. This is a simple program designed to keep you out of trouble and you decide how you want to use it.

Overview

The morespace is a very nice drive with plenty of pep and is whisper quiet. It does a good job as a backup drive and the included easy to use software does a creditable job.

If you need a backup drive, you should get one with as much storage space as you can afford. The price per GB drops to about $.25 per GB over 500 GBs.

by Rick Curran and ilene Hoffman