I've written previously (see "Speeding up Photoshop with an External Drive" and "Maximum Photoshop Performance") about configuring software and hardware to get the most out of Photoshop. Well, my long-awaited copy of Photoshop CS5 for the Mac arrived just a few weeks back. And, by happy coincidence, I had a new external hard drive to test out as a scratch drive with it: the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus mini from Other World Computing, purveyors of many fine things Macintosh.

Several things made this drive interesting. It's small-very small-about 5 x 3.5 x 2 inches and 1.5 pounds. It is truly a portable drive that can be powered by the FireWire port on your computer (it does come with an AC adapter, in case your machine doesn't have a FW port). It's got eSATA, a must for maximum performance—the FireWire cable can be plugged in to power the unit at the same time you're using the eSATA interface for data transfer.

Oh yeah, it's a RAID; this model, which runs $250, has two 500GB 7200 RPM drives. The MAXimus comes configured as RAID-1 (mirrored), if what you're after is secure storage, but it can be set up as RAID-0 (striped) to provide a full terabyte of really fast portable storage. Of course, that's the route I took. I paired it with the OWC Slim ExpressCard to eSATA Adapter, which lives permanently in my MacBook Pro. At $30, I just had to buy one, and it's a pretty slick performer. The eSATA-to-ExpressCard interface slows things down a bit so one realizes only about half the usual eSATA bandwidth, but it's a heck of a lot better than FireWire 800. Sure wish my iMac had eSATA or an ExpressCard slot. When trying the MAXimus on my iMac, I had to talk to it via FW800—more on that later.