Freecom’s Data Tank is a more expensive than its closest rivals, but provides extra features that may appeal to some users.

Priced at £279, the Data Tank contains two 500GB hard disks. There’s also a model available with two 1TB disks for £465. It has USB 2.0, and FireWire 400 and 800 interfaces, but there’s no eSATA interface so professional users who want that option for maximum performance may prefer one of the other drives – those from Iomega and Western Digital both include eSATA interfaces, and provide the same storage capacity while coming in at closer to the £200 mark.

Performance when using the FireWire 400 and 800 interfaces was similar to that of the other FireWire drives in the group, although USB performance was a little sluggish – 420 seconds to back up our 10GB batch of test files, compared to an average of 380 seconds for the rest.

We also had a little trouble setting the drive up initially as it’s sold pre-formatted in the Windows NTFS format, which doesn’t work properly with Macs. We tried – and failed – to reformat it into the Mac’s HFS+ format using Apple’s Disk Utility, and had to scour the PDF manual before realising that we had to repartition the drive before reformatting it (not the case with any other drive in this group). Fortunately, once that was done the drive worked well, and Freecom throws in some other useful software that further enhances the Data Tank’s Mac credentials.

Like most drives in this group the Data Tank supports JBOD, RAID 0 and RAID 1 modes, but while most of its rivals require you to turn them off and on with switches, the Data Tank Configuration software from Freecom allows you to quickly switch modes from your Mac desktop.

This software installs an option called One Button Sync that allows you to back up specified folders simply by pressing a button on the front of the drive (though only when using one of the FireWire interfaces). And, when using a FireWire connection, there’s also an option to create a special encrypted partition on the drive that prevents people viewing your files unless they enter the correct password.

So, while the Data Tank is slightly more expensive than some of its rivals, Freecom’s Mac software works well and its encryption option may well appeal to business users who want to keep their files safe.