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Obviously, the first performance enhancement you do on any computer you own is max out the RAM. RAM has gotten cheap, and adding more of it to almost any computer will make it faster without requiring any other modification (or any great skill). The next thing you need to do, says Larry O'Connor, the founder and CEO of Other World Computing (OWC), is move from a "platter" hard drive to a Solid State Drive (SSD). Larry's horse in this race is that his company sells SSDs, mostly for Macs. But he's a real evangelist about SSDs and computer mods in general, even if you buy them from NewEgg, Amazon or another vendor.

A big (vendor-neutral) thing Larry points out is that just because you have a Terabyte drive in your computer now doesn't mean you need a Terabyte SSD, which can easily cost $500. Rather, he says, all you need is a large enough SSD to contain your OS and software and whatever data you're working with at the moment, so you might be able to get by with a 120 GB SSD that costs well under $100. Clone your current main drive, stick in the new SSD, and if your need more storage, get another hard drive (or use your old one). Simple. Efficient. And a lot cheaper than buying a new computer, whether we're talking about home, business or even enterprise use. (Alternate video link.)

Long have Slashdot Editors made known the fact that we'll review pretty much any interesting gadget shipped our way. This week we have the OWC "Mercury On-The-Go", a 2.5" external hard drive featuring FW800 and USB2 ports and available in 40 to 160gb flavors. Read on for my review of the drive.

I plugged it into my PowerBook using the included USB cable Since the device didn't immediately mount, I guessed I needed power too- I was disappointed, but not exactly surprised. Another dive into the box revealed a firewire and power cable. Oh, and a one page "Manual" and CD. Seconds later I was off and running.

The back of the the drive tells the story: 2 FireWire 800 ports, one USB 2.0 Port, a power switch, and a power plug. The case is transparent. Of course that means all you see is a boring old hard drive. I sorta wanted to just use it upside down- the bottom of a hard drive is more aesthetically interesting than the top.

The drive arrived Mac formatted, and shipped with a bunch of wacky stuff on it, including the old Ellen Feiss Apple ad, and a directory with a slew of high quality disk icons. I'll be honest- I'm obsessive about things like drive icons. I make sure that my iPod icon is the correct version of the iPod on my desktop, or when I mount my digital camera or PSP, the icons match the device. So while I'm sure the vast majority of users would simply blow away the folder, I find touches like this very nice.

The Mercury comes with a little carrying case too. Nothing to write home about really. The unit itself is quite small- almost exactly the same size as my Nintendo DS. Unfortunately the case must also carry the power supply which makes the whole thing much larger.

I've used a number of external storage devices, and performance was roughly as I would expect. Since it's an external drive, read/write performance is really more about cabling than anything else. It took 3:36 to copy 3 gigs of data over USB, and 2:24 to copy the same 3 gigs over FW800. The upside is that the FW800 cable provides power- I was able to mount the drive without use of extra power cables.

So without further ado, I present to you my executive summary:

• It looks nice. Nothing spectacular, just nice.
• USB2 is slower and requires an external power supply
• A good choice for FW800 support.
• $150 for the 40GB version up to $450 for the 160GB version.

My struggle with this drive is really the "Why"? It occupies an incredibly expensive niche between "Portable" and "Large".

If vast storage is what you need, with less portability, a 320GB external USB drive can be had for around $150-200. Less mobile to be sure, but twice the storage for just over a third the price. I've included a photo of the Mercury with a Gameboy DS and iPod just to give you a sense of the scale of the whole thing.

The Mercury On-the-go isn't going into your shirt pocket: especially if you are using the USB connection and lugging the external power adapter. If what you really crave portability, a 60GB iPod is way smaller, doesn't require an external power supply, and runs like $400.

On the other hand, if you need 100-160 gigs, and plan to use a FW800 cable, this is a reasonable, but pricey option. It does exactly what you would expect in an external hard drive. It's quick, easy, and simple. It just doesn't seem cost effective to me.

smackthud asks: "I'm looking for an external firewire enclosure that works with a new 200GB Western Digital HD w/8mb cache. I tried putting the drive into my ADS pyro enclosure, however, the drive is seen by my G4 iMac as a 128GB drive, which is obviously incorrect. This is not a limitation of MacOSX 10.2 or the iMac, since the HFS+ filesystem supports 2TB+ file systems, and Firewire itself is device size agnostic. The enclosure simply isn't reporting the size of the drive properly. Some research has revealed that most enclosures that use the Oxford 911 bridge chipset do not support ATA100 drives larger than 120GB, while at least one supports up to160GB, but no more. My suspicion is that this is a limitation of the bridge controller's implementation of the ATA100 interface. I've heard that ATA100 had the optional ability to support 48bit address space rather than 32, which would mean that only those vendors who support the optional space would be able to address drives larger than 137GB. This may play a factor in Firewire chipsets which must bridge IDE to IEE1394. Existing products from both WD and Lacie prove that using this drive should be possible, and that any problems with large ATA100 drives have been solved by some vendors. Any helpful information or recommendations would be appreciated."

gsfprez writes "The fine folks at Other World Computing have teamed up with Newer Technology to release the perfect handle for your TiBook, because its also a stand: it folds underneath like the CRT iMac stand when you're parked. Previous handles were only handles, but the TiHandle actually gives you the tilt you wish you had with you all the time without the little feet popping off or overrotating."

gsfprez writes "The fine folks at Other World Computing have teamed up with Newer Technology to release the perfect handle for your TiBook, because its also a stand: it folds underneath like the CRT iMac stand when you're parked. Previous handles were only handles, but the TiHandle actually gives you the tilt you wish you had with you all the time without the little feet popping off or overrotating."

Gizzmonic asks: "I was looking at PowerPC upgrade cards for my Mac G3 Blue-and-White and I couldn't help but notice that the offerings by PowerLogix and Sonnet are quite pricey. So, I started poking around Motorola's site looking for the G4 or my dreams. I could probably pull a few strings at work and get them to order a G4 direct. Is there any reason that a G4 from Motorola wouldn't work with the ZIF socket on my motherboard? (Yes, I know about the G4 enabler software) Ordering from Motorola or one of their suppliers could potentially save me a lot of dough, but I'd hate to plunk down the money for an incompatible CPU. What do you folks think?"

AllInOne writes: "Despite Apple's claims to the contrary, Mac OS X runs just fine on older Apple hardware. Thanks to the Open Source nature of Apple's underlying Darwin system serveral clueful folks have written kernel extensions that allow "Old World" machines such as the 7300, 7600, 8500 etc to run OS X. They even support G3 & G4 processor upgrades cards as well. The best release (and free as in beer) is by Ryan Rempel. I just installed his Version 2.0b3 of Unsupported UtilityX on my old 8550 with a Newer G3 upgrade card along along with 10.1 and performance is quite respectable." And elsewhere along the OS price/performance front, Cinematique writes: "I was surfing around and came across this useful little tidbit for mac os x users. Apparently, apple included a way to compress the memory-hungry finder window buffer images, but didn't turn it on at the last minute due to a debuging issue. this turns the compression on, thus saving a sh*tload of memory."

AllInOne writes: "Despite Apple's claims to the contrary, Mac OS X runs just fine on older Apple hardware. Thanks to the Open Source nature of Apple's underlying Darwin system serveral clueful folks have written kernel extensions that allow "Old World" machines such as the 7300, 7600, 8500 etc to run OS X. They even support G3 & G4 processor upgrades cards as well. The best release (and free as in beer) is by Ryan Rempel. I just installed his Version 2.0b3 of Unsupported UtilityX on my old 8550 with a Newer G3 upgrade card along along with 10.1 and performance is quite respectable." And elsewhere along the OS price/performance front, Cinematique writes: "I was surfing around and came across this useful little tidbit for mac os x users. Apparently, apple included a way to compress the memory-hungry finder window buffer images, but didn't turn it on at the last minute due to a debuging issue. this turns the compression on, thus saving a sh*tload of memory."