"500GB MERCURY ON-THE-GO - HIGHEST CAPACITY PORTABLE STORAGE DRIVE ON THE MARKET
Back up Your Entire Desktop Computer and Bring It with You
April 17, 2008 Woodstock, IL -- Other World Computing (OWC) http://www.macsales.com, announced today their highest capacity portable, bus-powered storage drive to date - the OWC Mercury On-The-Go 500GB, 5400RPM portable storage drive. The Mercury On-The-Go 500GB offers blazing-fast FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 connections, now available with 56% more data capacity than the previous award-winning Mercury On-The-Go model. Immediately available and priced at $359.99, the Mercury On-The-Go 500GB portable drive is a palm-sized performer with huge capacity that fits in a shirt pocket. Built with the latest reliable, high-performance drive mechanisms and interfaced with OWC's custom bridge solution featuring the Oxford924 chipset, the Mercury On-The-Go is ready for your largest projects yet...
For easy backup, the portable drive also includes the full retail software versions of the latest award-winning Prosoft DataBackup III for OS X and NovaStor NovaBackup for Windows. The Mercury On-The-Go is "Time Machine" ready, meaning that it keeps an up-to-date copy of all of your files and documents under OS X Leopard(tm), so you can go back in time, anytime, to recover anything with ease.
In addition to the Mercury On-The-Go 500GB drive with 5400RPM performance, OWC also offers a full line of On-The-Go models with USB 2.0, USB 2.0+eSATA, FireWire 400+USB2, as well as additional FireWire 800/400+USB2 models in capacities of 120GB-320GB, priced from $97.99; and 7200RPM Mercury On-The-Go models in capacities of 100GB-200GB, priced from $119.99.

All Mercury On-The-Go portable drives are available immediately through OWC and other retailers. The drives ship with a carrying case; cables for all interfaces specific on-the-go model supports; Prosoft DataRescue III for OS X; and NovaStor NovaBackup for Windows. All drives are covered by a one-year warranty and are compatible with Apple OS Versions 8.5 through 9.2.x; Apple OS X 10.0.3 and higher (including the latest OS 10.5.x); and Microsoft Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista.
For more information, see: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go."

NOTE: Originally I assumed the drive inside was a Samsung M6 500GB SATA model but it's not Jamie at OWC tells me - it's the Hitachi 5K500 which is 12.5mm high (too tall for most notebooks or the Mini to use internally, although the 17in Macbook Pro can use 12.5mm drives he said).
Last month I mentioned an article saying the Samsung M6 were the first 500GB notebook drive to ship to OEMs/mfrs so I assumed they were using the M6 - which unlike the Hitachi/Fujitsu 500GB notebook drives the Samsung was spec'd at 9.5m high, not 12.5mm. (If the drive had been 9.5mm I was thinking of the dual upgrade - where you use the HD in the case for an internal drive upgrade and re-use the original HD in the ext. case.)

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