Out of box experience:

     The Mercury Elite-AL Pro comes with everything you need including all the cables for each type of interface. They also include backup software called NovaBACKUP for the PC which we'll cover later.

     The Mercury Elite-AL Pro looks and feels far superior to other external hard drives and hard drive enclosures we've seen before. Although the Mercury Elite-AL Pro has a generic and quite sterile look to it, the housing is made out of solid and very high quality aluminum. The device is somewhat heavy and although it's probably molded or rolled aluminum, it reminds me of something that was carved out of a solid chunk of aluminum with a CNC machine. So my overall first impression with the device is ultra top quality unsurpassed by anything I've seen before.

     The front of the Mercury Elite-AL Pro is simple, yet pleasing to the eye with a touch of industrial level quality.

     The back side of the device is jammed with pretty much every type of interface you could ever want or need. For this review we'll be covering the most popular PC interfaces including eSATA and USB.  

     Excuse me while I void my warranty... Okay, here we go. It appears that OWC is using Hitachi Serial ATA Deskstar 7K1000 hard drives, which by the way was the industries first 1 terabyte hard drive. This particular hard drive, Part # 0A35155, retails for $249.99 on OWC's own website as of the date of this review. That leaves about $100 for the external enclosure, power supply, and all the cables. This price seems pretty reasonable to me... Not to mention the 7K1000 is a very good hard drive and you can read our review here.