Review: Freecom Mobile Drive Mg

Extra storage is an absolute necessity these days, whether you want to use it for overflow of files or simply as a backup solution. Luckily, there is an absolute myriad of solutions out there to help you make the perfect choice when it comes to storing all those ones and zeros that make up your most precious memories. Freecom has declared its love for the Mac market with this very  nicely crafted drive that it rightly calls Mobile. It’s tiny. And it holds three quarters of a terabyte. It’s really impressive and so thin that we initially thought it was a solid-state drive.

The tiny Mobile Drive Mg is the perfect companion for your MacBook Pro

Unfortunately it is a regular platter drive but this has a number of advantages, the most noteworthy being price. The Mobile Drive is incredibly good value at £115 and its Low Noise technology means that you’ll hardly even notice it’s running. The model we tested was the Mg version, which also comes with USB 3.0 but as this doesn’t come on any Macs at the moment we were limited to using  just the FireWire 800 port.

The styling is aimed squarely at the MacBook Pro owners’ club with a magnesium enclosure, which mimics the aluminium used in Apple laptops. The metal isn’t as rugged as aluminium but it is a great deal lighter so the hard drive weighs barely anything for its size. We were worried that it wouldn’t stand up to excessive bumps and knocks. These doubts were unfounded in the end, though, as the drive was happy enough during our testing and, in fact, the magnesium was less prone to marks and scrapes than our MacBook Pro. Magnesium has been opted for in this case because of its green credentials and the heat syncing properties it has too.
The Drive is truly plug and play as it is formatted for Macs, which means if you want you can simply plug it in and get going, whether that’s dragging and dropping files or using the drive as a time machine backup. Read and write speeds are as you would expect from a drive of this kind, but other perks include a full two-year warranty and unlimited free helpdesk support. Overall this is a great product, competitively priced that is perfect for the Mac market.