The important part, The F1-B:

    Below is the top and bottom of the F1. As I said previously, the F1 has a futuristic styling. Nothing comes to mind when I try to describe it, other than it is, well, futuristic. It does look pretty good on the desk, or on top of the case. Which reminds me...There is no cushioning, or rubber pads on the bottom of the F1. It is designed so that the 4 corners come down to the surface you have the unit on. Actually I say that because that seems about right. I immediately put 4 felt tabs on the bottom of my F1. I have an aluminum Lian Li case. Damn straight, I'm not going to scratch that up on purpose, or carelessly.

(11) Top of unit	(12) Bottom of unit

    Moving to the bottom of the F1, support info, and the serial number is displayed on a sticker. Since the 3 models of the F1-B come with hard drives preinstalled, you don't need to go into your unit. Hence, the warranty void sticker. In the last picture looking through the Metal hard drive tray, (the rest of the unit is plastic) you can see the "JB" description at the end of the model number. That means it does have 8 meg cache. Doing some speed tests on the next page, unfortunately this enclosure, or maybe it is my USB 2.0, doesn't seem to take full advantage of this 7200 RPM drive very well.

(13) Support and serial number	(14) No tampering here...	(15) Yup, look closely, it is a JB

    The back of the unit, from left to right, is the AC power in, an on/off switch, (thank you) two reserved for future? Firewire inputs that are of course not on the controller board, and then the USB 2.0 female receptacle. Trust me, you'll want USB 2.0, as USB 1.1 is limited to about 1 meg per second throughput.

(16) Back of the unit

    In picture 17, you can see the F1 lying flat on my test bench. Note the air holes in the metal hard drive cage for air. There is no fan in the F1, but during testing it never got hot enough to warrant taking out a temp probe. In 18, The F1 is powered on. There are 8 LED's that light up a solid green when on. In use, the LED's turn red, and swirl, if you will, in a counter clockwise fashion. Lastly for this particular section, in picture 19, the three control buttons can bee seen. "Data Backup," "OS Backup," and "Restore" are how they are labeled. Pretty easy to figure out what they do now huh?

(17) Front shot	(18) LED and buttons	(19) Another shot w/flash

The software:

    Running setup off the Coolmax software CD with XP Pro installed on the test bed, brings you to picture 20. If you look closer at it, you'll see the final size of the 160 gigabyte hard disk that came pre-formatted, and some of the other files on the CD. They are there for bootable purposes. You should be, or have administrator rights to install the software. You can also designate all users of the PC access to the software, or just you.

(20) Begin install, HD properties, and CD contents	(21) Able to use?

    After you go through the brief software install, a required reboot later, and you are at picture 22. Yes the driver is unsigned, but in all Coolmax products, or now that I think about it, in general, I have never had any real issues with unsigned software. An icon is added to your system tray for the Xtreme files, and a new "Remove" drive icon. I fiddled with that, and tried to disable USB performance enhancements, but it wouldn't let me. Well, it did, but the setting never stuck. Luckily an option of that software is to remove that icon, which I did. Windows has a built in icon for removable devices that you can see just to the right of it. Which you should do, if you have to remove a removable the drive in Windows while your unit is on. Data loss can occur if you don't stop your device before unplugging it, or turning it off. You also notice this is the second version of the software. Some of my qualms from version 1.0 are still there, but it all evens itself out really in the end with the addition of the disk image cration...

(22) The driver	(23) New remove icon...
(24) Software version
(25) Stop the device

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