miniStack Max - Review

[STL Mark]

I purchased a bare miniStack Max and received it today from OWC. I was impressed enough with their company after my recent memory experience to make another purchase. At the time when I purchased mine there was a $129.00 special for "open box" units that they had a small quantity of.

I found the unit arrived in about 3 days even though I took advantage of their free shipping option. The case was nicely packaged and the product looked remarkably good. I could not even tell it was a refurb or open box. All the needed screws existed for the project I was about to take on. My goal was a nice addition to my MM that I could expand on in the future.

I removed a 2TB drive from a working PC and installed it easily into the miniStack Max. I found the video on their web site and the installation brochure gave me all of the information I needed to install the drive. It was my decision to leave the optical drive slot open for now but have the option to easily add an optical drive in the future.

The process was remarkably easy and I connected the miniStack Max to the MM which immediately recognized it as a 2TB NTFS drive. I then began a learning experience where my knowledge of using the Disk Utility did not allow me to partition the 2TB NTFS partition with 600gb of used space to create a new partition for Time Machine. I then took the miniStack Max to a Windows 7 laptop and opened the Disk Management console and ran the "Shrink a Volume" function to minimize the original partition. Then using the "Simple Volume Wizard" created a new partition with the unused space. This allowed me to go back to the MM with the miniStack Max and successfully replace this newly created partition with a time machine partition. Now my miniStack Max has a drive (partition) that will work great with Time Machine. And if I have the desire I can still boot a Windows PC off of the drive. My total investment was the $129 price and I gained a nice addition to my system.

I would not hesitate to recommend the miniStack Max to friends. I found it to be quite easy to work with and compatible with both Mac and PC based systems.

[Bandit Bill]

That's cool. Thanks for the review.

Perhaps you can update us after you have used it for a while. ie. noise etc.