The EZQuest Monsoon is an excellent quality, compact, high performance disk drive. It comes preformatted for Mac OS 9 or X, but you can easily reformat it for Windows or Linux.

You can permanently attach the Monsoon hard drive to your computer for storing extra music, video, and photos. The Monsoon is also small enough that you can carry it with you so you can share your files with your friends. While its not as small as an iPod, this version I got is 320 GB, which holds 4 times more than the largest iPod. Accessing your files will also be much faster due to the high-performance 7200 RPM disk.

There are lots of hard drives out there, and only a few things which differentiate them. The main factors which should cause you to choose one over another are the included accessories, and the build quality (of course, price helps too).

The EZQuest comes with both USB and Firewire data cables. There is a plastic stand which you can use if you want to stand your drive vertically. They include a Quick Install Guide / product catalog. We have the hard disk itself, and the power brick. Finally, they include a quick instruction card for Windows users, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

This is a pretty complete set of attachments, and there isn’t anything else they could have reasonably provided. If you plan on using firewire, you’ll notice that there is a firewire pass-through port. This means that you can connect up more drives through this one. Suprisingly, not all external drives support this, and its a nice feature.

One thing you’ll notice is that the drive is heavy for its size. The case of the Monsoon is made out of aluminum, and is much better quality than the cheaper plastic cases sold by some of their competitors. Aluminum also transmits heat much better than plastic, which means that the Monsoon doesn’t need an active fan. Consequently, the Monsoon runs much quieter than a plastic drive with a fan.

Inside the Monsoon is a standard ATA hard drive. The one I received was a Hitachi Desk Star, but you may get a different one depending on what production run you get. Because it is a standard ATA disk, you can upgrade the drive in the future. Please note, however, that opening up the case will void your warranty.

An interesting thing about the EZQuest is that it comes formatted for Macintosh computers. Most disks come formatted for either Windows or Mac, and I think its a shame that they it that way. If you have a Windows PC, you’ll have to reformat the disk so that you can use it. This doesn’t take long, but Windows will only let you format it in a Windows-specific way. If you want to be able to use your Monsoon on any computer (Linux, Windows, or Mac), you’ll need to format it as Fat32. You can find instructions to do so for OS X, or Windows.

Overall, the EZQuest Monsoon drive is a compact, high performance drive. It has good build quality, runs quietly, and can work with any sort of personal computer. If you are looking for an external hard drive, this one should be on your short list.