I bought this drive, like most people, to accompany my Mac Mini and it has served me pretty well. The obvious attraction is that it is designed to fit on top or underneath the Mac Mini and match its brushed aluminium and white plastic looks. I think this makes a fantastic addition to the Mac Mini or other small desktop, laptop, or notebooks for whom a lack of both storage space and connectivity is a problem as this provides a nice amount of both. It's 3 USB ports and 2 Firewire 400 ports have come in incredibly useful in connecting all my peripherals over the past few years.

The down sides are that it is a little loud and can get a bit hot. I used this drive for recording music and found that the sound of this hard drive doing its thing found its way on to a lot of my musical output over the last couple of years. The extra heat from stacking the drive made my Mac Mini's fan work a lot harder which again was pretty noisy - probably quite a bearable level of noise for most but not for its primary intended use.

That said, I would still recommend the MiniMax as I believe the combination of USB, Firewire and storage space will probably not be found for much cheaper or in a smarter looking package.