So, my 120 Gig LaCie Rugged All Terrain Hard Drive arrived today. It was a bit cold off the UPS truck, so I gave it a few minutes to warm to room temperature and then plugged it into my MacBook Pro via the FireWire 800 port with the included cable.

Let me just say first that I think it's awesome that it comes with all the cables included. It has a FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and USB power cable. The last is in case your USB or FireWire port has the amount of juice it puts out throttled and you need an extra zap of power to spin the drive up.

I hooked mine up with the FireWire 800 cable and that apparently had enough juice at the bus. The drive was quickly registered and installed by my MacBook Pro and ready to go without any special formatting, drivers, or jujumagumbo needed.

In an unscientific, non-precision test, I copied a 796.7 megabyte folder of mixed files, timing it with the second hand on my watch. From the time I dropped the folder onto the new disk to the time the copying dialog said it was finished took about 35 seconds, giving it a ~22 megabyte per second write speed. Copying the folder back to my internal hard drive took 23 seconds, giving it a ~34 megabyte per second read speed.

Those read and write speeds are pretty darn sharp. They'll handle most uses (including video editing and viewing) without creating significantly noticeable disk lag over the internal drive. And with 120 gigs of space (111.78 gigs usable), that basically doubles the drive capacity of your average off-the-shelf MacBook Pro.

It's a little pricier than your average USB 2.0 or USB/FireWire combo drive of the same capacity. You're paying for the "ruggedizing", plus the extra circuitry of the triple port design, plus the extra cables. But, there are distinct advantages you buy...

• Because Apple limits the amount of juice at the USB port on the MacBook Pro's USB port (I haven't confirmed this personally so much as read it in review after review of USB 2.0 bus-powered drives), you generally have to sacrifice both USB ports to run a bus-powered external hard drive. As this runs fine off the juice going out of the FireWire 800 port, you get to keep both USB ports open for other devices.
• There is definitely a noticeable speed boost when you hook it up via FireWire 800 instead of the USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 ports.
• Of the FireWire capable devices out there, most are FireWire 400, and few are FireWire 800. Hooking this up via FireWire 800 allows you to keep both USB 2.0 and the FireWire 400 port, which are in greater demand, open and available.

All in all, I'd say keeping the ports free and the speed boost make this worth the premium. How else can you add 120 gigs of high-speed data storage to your MacBook Pro for under $200?

One of the "next on my list" peripherals for my MacBook Pro has been an external hard drive. I have one, but it's AC powered and I wanted a bus powered one for travel and ease of use.

After a lot of looking around and reading reviews, I settled on the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive.

If you want a review of it, it was a cNet Editor's Choice in August 2006. They tested the 80 gigabyte model, but as far as I can tell, the performance is pretty consistent along the line (80, 100, and 120 gig models).

With a ruggedized 2.5" form factor drive plus USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 connectors (even comes with a FireWire 800 cable included), it isn't a simple backup unit. If you want that, there are plenty of cheaper and faster options you can leave plugged in at home. This is a road warrior's buddy for increasing hard drive space on your MacBook Pro by up to double with a unit that is both speedy and resilient.

In cNet's tests, it read a 10 gig folder of mixed files at an average of around 19.3 megabytes per second on FireWire 400 and 22.1 megabytes per second on FireWire 800. And with the FireWire 800 connection, it also wrote a 10 gig folder of mixed files at 20 megabytes per second. While the read speeds are not particularly impressive compared to most USB 2.0 external drives, the write speeds blew them out of the water, writing data at more than double the speed of comparable 2.5" USB 2.0 drives.

Everything I've read suggests that the power output on the MacBook and MacBook Pro's USB ports is too low to power most USB hard drives, requiring you to use a secondary USB-to-power cable to make up the gap. That means monopolizing all your USB ports. But it seems that the firewire ports have more juice and do well with bus-powered units.

But more than that, with the FireWire 800 connector, if you have a MacBook Pro, you don't have to sacrifice your FireWire 400 or USB ports. And since there aren't a whole lot of FireWire 800 products, the drive won't have a lot of competition for that port.

Of course, if you're powering it off the laptop's FireWire or USB bus, that's going to lower how long your laptop will run on battery power. But, when you're plugged in at home, on a plane, at a coffee house, or in a hotel room, that won't matter. And if you divide your files intelligently between it and your internal hard drive, you should be able to use it sparingly when you're not plugged in to maximize battery life.

I just ordered the 120 Gig model from NewEgg and will post a new entry when I've put it through its paces next week.

It's easy to get into a Mac Vs. Windows argument when discussing certain features of OSX. It seems that, in the head of would-be Mac defenders, Apple can do no wrong.

The odd thing is that any former Windows user who voluntarily switched to Mac has already admitted that they consider Mac superior to Windows PCs. But that doesn't mean that this has to be a blanket admission. The purchase of a Mac does not immediately imply that a former Windows user has sipped at the Mac Kool-Aid.

Switching from Windows to Mac is hard, and the more of a "power user" you are, the harder it is. You have more keyboard shortcuts, small specialized apps, and customizations and tweaks on your Windows system than an average user. That also means that you have a lot more work ahead of you to replicate these things on your Mac to create a comfortable working environment.

That is not to say that users like myself are trying to make Mac into a Windows clone. We switched to have fewer spyware worries, to have all that fun commandline Unix under the hood, to have a wide variety of advantages. But a few things in the interface can give us pause.

For me, the biggest and most disconcerting adjustment is the loss of the "Explorer Interface", both in terms of browsing my own hard drive and in terms of finding an FTP client that offers it.

I just find the way the Mac Finder works to be... inefficient. That doesn't mean I think that the interface should be changed to the Windows way and only that way. But it would be nice if the "Explorer Interface" were an option.

This isn't me trying to make my Mac work like Windows. This is just a good thing that I'm surprised is missing from OSX. But if I ask why OSX can't offer this functionality (in addition to the existing functions, not instead of them), I get jumped on by the Mac faithful. It's as if I defiled a holy place by suggesting that Apple adopt one of the things I believe Microsoft got right.

I'm told to get used to it. I'm told that I should consider that maybe the Finder works this way "for a reason". Maybe it does, but at least for me, that reason doesn't mesh with the way I like to work and am used to working. I'd love to "get used to it", but if it slows me down and if my productivity is negatively affected, that is a bad thing.

There are a lot of good things about Apple and OSX, but Microsoft isn't retaining its market share simply because it's ingrained. Some of it is that Apple has thought so differently, that the Mac environment can feel alien to people who have become used to Windows. And if the answer to "how can I make my environment more comfortable" is "like it or lump it", that's just wrong.

I'm starting to regret switching. I miss some really minor little things that I now realize I took for granted. But more than that, it's just frustrating trying to get those little things so I can work in ways that are comfortable and familiar for me. But rather than accomodate me, it seems both Apple and its legions of faithful tell me that I should feel privileged to accomodate Apple.

And the sad thing is that power users like me are influencers. We're the ones our friends, family, and business associates look to for advice on hardware, software, etc. We're the ones who will persuade or dissuade people on the topic of switching. And when we're feeling frustrated, regretting our Mac purchase, and avoiding getting down to work because it feels so klunky to do it on our Macs, we're going to tell people to stick with Windows and avoid Mac.

I'm finding I really am not liking being a Mac owner as much as I thought I would, and my advice to anyone who is reasonably happy with Windows is to stick with it. If you need to be productive in more areas than e-mail, Adobe design tools, and Microsoft Office, you're going to spend days trying to find a replacement for those little apps you used so often and will miss like the dickens when you can't find a Mac equivalent that has the same feature set.

I miss four little things...

• The two-pane interface from Windows Explorer
• Crimson Editor (tabbed MDI and a great bracket matching function)
• WinSCP - SCP and SFTP with a Windows Explorer style filesystem browser.
• IrfanView - Probably the best little graphics viewing/cropping/converting utility around. Easy, functional, free... love it.

But when I'm developing sites, these things are the three things I use most and I cannot find functional equivalents on OSX. It makes work less "fun" and more frustrating.

What is it with Apple? They want to be taken seriously as a machine for professionals. They even go so far as to brand one of their lines of laptops as "Pro" (MacBook Pro), and then they ignore one of the most important tools for a pro laptop... a docking station or port replicator.

Many, many moons ago, it was common to have a desktop for your in-office work and a laptop for travel and work on the road. Well, not necessarily common for everyone, but if you had a laptop, it was usually your second/secondary computer, a stepchild to your desktop.

But in the past few years, the trend has moved toward dumping the desktop and using a laptop for everything. But as anyone who has owned a laptop without a docking station or port replicator has learned, this is a royal pain in the patootie.

Most people, when they work with the laptop at their desk, prefer the ease of a real mouse, real full-size keyboard, and real monitor. But imagine connecting and disconnecting each of those manually every time you need to leave your desk and take your laptop along. And most people aren't just plugging in those three... There may be a USB or Firewire cradle for your PDA, one for your music player, a cable for your speakers, and let's not forget the LAN cable and the power cable.

With a dock or port replicator, you connect the laptop... voila. Without one, you're connecting and disconnecting up to 8 or even 9 different cables every time you want to take the laptop off your desk or bring it back to the desk.

I've been wanting to switch to Mac and was pricing out a nice little 17" desktop replacement MacBook Pro. I did a search of Apple's site for a dock or port replicator and got nada. I searched Google and found one company selling a MacBook Pro dock, but it's for the 15" model and doesn't support FireWire 800.

When I went searching for a dock or port replicator for the 17" MacBook Pro, I found a number of forums where people told stories of how they wanted to switch, but the lack of a dock was a deal-breaker. And it wasn't just individuals, but small business owners who would have bought 10 or 20 Apple laptops, but instead had to settle for Lenovo or HP solutions because the docking station was just that important to them.

Perhaps Apple's done the research and concluded that it would be more expensive to produce and market a docking station than it would be worth. At least I hope that's the case. And I hope that they really crunched the numbers to come to that decision. Because, like a number of these other people, I'd like to switch, but the lack of a dock could end up being the deal-breaker that keeps me in the Windows world.