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SimpleTech Redrive

David Murphy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:05:12 -0600

In some alternate world, Fabrik’s SimpleTech Redrive is winning a Kick Ass award from Green PC—Maximum PC’s eco-conscious sister publication. This is the most environmentally friendly external storage device we’ve ever tested. From its packaging, to its construction, to its guts, the Redrive is designed with a single purpose in mind: saving the planet. As a byproduct of this, the drive saves you energy and, consequently, money.

Saving energy generally doesn’t lead to superior speeds in the storage world. And it wouldn’t with the Redrive either if the drive had connection options other than USB. Over an eSATA connection, for example, its internal 500GB Western Digital Caviar Green drive would perform far more slowly than a majority of the external devices we’ve tested. This is because the Caviar Green drive modulates between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, sacrificing performance for energy savings when compared to the standard 7,200rpm hard drives used by most external storage products.

The Redrive's shell is constructed of bamboo and recycled aluminum. The latter doubles as a handy heatsink for the hard drive itself.

Since the Redrive is constrained to the pipeline of a USB connection, the Caviar Green’s overall speed is of less relevance. In fact, the Redrive ends up beating every other USB external device we’ve tested in our synthetic benchmarks. The catch is that you won’t notice any real-world difference, given that it beats the speeds of similar USB external drives by less than five percent.

However, the Redrive also comes bundled with the same TurboUSB technology that’s included with Buffalo’s external storage offerings. This proprietary application allows the drive to shoot past the traditional 37MB/s speed cap we’ve experienced with all other external USB drives.

Unlike Buffalo’s DriveStation Combo 4, the Redrive has a slight issue with its TurboUSB functionality. The software pushes the Redrive’s average write speeds 20 percent faster than normal, and faster than any USB-based drive we’ve tested, but it fails to increase the drive’s read speeds. This isn’t the case with the DriveStation Combo 4, which enjoys speed increases of approximately 20 percent on both its reads and writes when compared to standard USB speeds. The consequence of this is that the DriveStation Combo 4 edges out the Redrive in our real-world benchmark, PCMark05, by 2 percent.

A simple scheduled-backup application rounds out the Redrive’s feature set. While the discrepancies between the device’s TurboUSB read and write speeds are a slight ding, there is nothing else about the Redrive that makes us sour. In this case, green is golden.

Toshiba 320GB Portable Drive

David Murphy — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:40:00 -0500

Toshiba’s 320GB portable drive is so plain it doesn’t even have a real name. It’s just the Toshiba 320GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as Western Digital’s My Passport Elite, the Toshiba 320’s primary competition in terms of size, speed, and software (see our review of the Elite here).

Toshiba’s middle-of-the-road drive would benefit
from additional backup and synchronization features.

The USB-only Toshiba 320 posted the slowest real-world read speeds of any drive we’ve tested. However, these lapses represent only a four percent difference in real-world performance when compared to the fastest non-proprietary drive we’ve tested, Western Digital’s My Passport Elite. Four percent is four percent, but it’s not enough to make a significant difference.

Fortunately, the Toshiba 320’s poor read speeds were ameliorated by quick write speeds—the second-fastest we’ve seen from our write benchmark. It’s a great accomplishment considering that the write-speed victor, Buffalo’s DriveStation Combo 4 (reviewed September 2008), uses a proprietary TurboUSB utility to squeak even more speed out of its connection.

Portable USB storage devices tend to post similar read and write speeds in our benchmark tests, so we use the drives’ included software as a way to further distinguish between them. We dinged the My Passport Elite for offering too many redundant software options, including no less than three backup and synchronization programs. Toshiba’s drive solves this issue by including only two programs.

NTI Shadow 3 is a simple application for backing up your files. It comes with both synchronization and scheduled-backup options. That’s it. The other piece of software, NTI Ripper, attempts to fill a void that iTunes already filled long ago. Turning CD tracks into digital audio files lost its complexity five years ago—and that’s being generous.

As a drive, the Toshiba 320 is competitive. As a backup solution, it ignores some of the more exciting possibilities in the storage space, such as file encryption. Somewhere between the software-bloated My Passport Elite and stripped down Toshiba 320 lies the perfect backup/storage device. We’ll keep searching for it.

SimpleTech Signature Mini USB 2.0 Portable Drive

David Murphy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:54:16 -0500

We thought only Western Digital was dipping drives into the Skittles rainbow, but SimpleTech’s new line of USB drives are just as colorful as their Western Digital counterparts. The devices in the Signature Mini line range in capacity from 120GB to 320GB and come in seven colors. We tested the 250GB Mini Kiwi, a 5,400rpm, 2.5-inch drive that’s one of the fastest portable storage devices we’ve reviewed.

The Mini Kiwi’s green case comes in a matte finish, not a polished shine. We’d love to see the latter someday!

But this fruit is bruised. The ArcSoft backup program failed to burn and create images from CDs and DVDs—it couldn’t find the optical drives on any of our Windows XP or Vista rigs. The program also limits your backup destinations to the Mini Kiwi.

Given its showy aesthetic, we were disappointed that the device’s on signal is an ugly red LED. Since the top of the Mini Kiwi looks like a button, we’re also surprised by the lack of a one-touch backup option.

The Mini Kiwi is speedy but not great in any other area. WD’s My Passport Essential (February 2008) is comparably fast and cheaper, and free programs like Idlebackup trounce the Mini Kiwi’s bundled software.

Western Digital My Passport Elite

David Murphy — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:29:22 -0500

Here we go again: Western Digital has launched yet another line of portable USB hard drives. The four drives in the My Passport Elite series don’t vary by size, just color. You’re free to select a capacity of 250GB or 320GB in gunmetal gray, old-shoe brown, a soft blue finish, or a sandy red. And as far as we can tell, that’s one of the few differences between this line of devices and Western Digital’s “normal” My Passport Essential drives—the latter having 11 different colors and four different capacity points to choose from.

The 320GB My Passport Elite drive performs nearly identically to its 250GB My Passport Essential cousin. The two are so neck-and-neck in our real-world benchmark that it would be silly to award the Elite major accolades for churning out a PCMark05 score that’s only 30 points ahead. Both of these drives completely fill the USB pipeline--they're the fastest we've seen, but at this point in portable storage, a number of drives are hitting up against this throughput wall. Rest assured, you’ll see no discernable difference between file transfers on an Elite-branded drive versus an Essential drive.

The Elite’s significant difference is that it comes bundled with MioNet, a handy little program that allows you to remote-access the various computers it’s installed on via a single software interface. Gone are the days of having to fire up VNC connections and finagle IP addresses. MioNet makes file-sharing but one word: easy. It’s a great solution for those who want to be able to access their files without having to continually copy up-to-the-minute chunks of a hard drive to the portable device.

While we appreciate the other software bundled on the My Passport Elite, it’s the same-ol’ same-ol’ that we’ve seen from Western Digital for awhile now. The WD Sync utility lets you access your documents, settings, and Outlook files on multiple computers when you plug in your optical drive. It's extremely handy if you regularly use multiple computers, but this software also comes with Essential drives--where's the innovation, Western Digital? On the backup front, the drive's Anywhere Backup application is showing its age: we can name a number of freeware applications that offer increased functionality with less graphical annoyances.

Another major downside with the My Passport Elite is the sheer number of applications it dumps on your system with a standard installation. After we installed all the drive’s bells and whistles, we were left with three auto-loading applications on startup—MioNet, WD Sync, and WD Anywhere Backup. That’s a bit much for a single drive, and makes us wonder why Western Digital just doesn’t consolidate the features of its programs into a single application. It would be a far more elegant solution than the current approach: firing up each program’s interface to see if this, that, or the other was the backup solution we were thinking of.

Eye-Fi Wireless Flash Card

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:51:42 -0600

Miniaturization has brought us amazing advances—tiny transistors, microscopic nanotubes, bite-size Frosted Mini Wheats, and now the Eye-Fi. Combining a 2GB flash card with a Wi-Fi radio, this affordable hybrid card lets you easily upload pictures directly from your camera to the web and your PC.

Setup is easy. You plug it into your PC and run the included software, pick from a list of photo-sharing sites (including SmugMug, Flickr, and Facebook), create an Eye-Fi account, and configure security (40-128 bit WEP, WPA-PSK, or WPA2-PSK). For our test, we uploaded images to SmugMug from our Canon EOS 1D-MkII N.

Like magic, images we shot popped up on our SmugMug page and the client PC. Of course, Wi-Fi capability in a digital camera isn’t new—but it’s never been this cheap, this tiny, or this universal. Because the Eye-Fi is a standard-size SD card, it should work in almost any camera.

So what’s wrong with it? Speed. It took roughly 6 minutes to transfer a 5MB image over our corporate LAN, which has 14Mb uploads and 30Mb downloads. Bang out 35 photos, and you’ll have to leave the camera on for the evening to upload your pics. Fortunately, the images are also stored on the card, so if you shut down, you can resume your upload later. What is wacky is that images are sent from the card to Eye-Fi’s server, which then disperses them to your website or PC. The impact on battery life is difficult to gauge but is certainly a drag. The card also can’t upload video or RAW files and doesn’t work with access points without security or in peer-to-peer mode.

Despite all these warts, the Eye-Fi is still very cool. You could, for example, use it to post snaps of your hot New Year’s party to the web as it’s happening. The card’s also handy for tuckered parents who don’t have the energy to upload images of little Timmy to a web page for grandma to see. With the Eye-Fi, you bang out a couple of shots and set your camera down. There are clearly improvements to be made, but for $100, it’s a fun toy to try out.

Western Digital Passport 250GB

David Murphy — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:30:32 -0600

Pink is our new obsession, and we have Western Digital to blame. Its pink, portable Passport hard drive (try saying that fast) is small enough to fit in Steven Tyler’s mouth, yet it comes with two of our most favorite features in the world: sweet speeds and snazzy backup software. And to top it off, you have to carry only a single USB cable alongside the little sweetheart, as there’s no accompanying power brick or annoying connector.

You get a crisp 250GB of storage with the pink Passport drive; accompanying programs soak up 60MB of that space. We have no objection to this, save for Western Digital’s continued insistence on bundling Google spam alongside every external hard drive it sells. At least the autorun/installer application is less intrusive about slapping a toolbar, desktop search, and Picasa on your machine than previous Western Digital products—you can now choose whether to install those items.

The Passport is one of the speediest portable hard drives in the size-of-your-hand category, pulling in a wonderful 34.7MB/s average read speed during our synthetic HD Tach benchmark test. OWC’s 160GB, 7,200RPM Mercury On-the-Go (reviewed August 2007) just overtakes the Passport’s average read speed by 1MB/s; the OWC device loses the overall matchup, however, by being 90GB smaller and costing $50 more.

Included with the Passport is the ever-awesome WD Sync software. It’s a staple of Western Digital’s portable drive line, and it’s easy to see why—the synchronized backup is simple and clutter-free, and the fully functioning mobile Outlook client turns our cheeks pink with delight.

Corsair Flash Survivor GT

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:48:10 -0500

We’ve used too many Jack Bauer references lately, but c’mon, how could we review this key and not say it’s the one Jackie boy would use?

The 8GB Flash Survivor GT, after all, is shock and water resistant—and if your service automatic runs out of ammo, you can even fling its hard aluminum body at someone’s head. But how does it perform?

Quite well, actually. Older keys can deliver great speeds with medium and large files but are painfully slow when transferring small ones. The Survivor GT, however, is speedy with all file sizes in both reading and writing tests. So if you need to copy that PowerPoint presentation off of Salazar’s laptop before the building explodes, this is the thumb drive for you. The Survivor GT handily beats the original Flash Voyager GT in all our read and write tests.

We also tested the Survivor by dunking it in boiling water, freezing it, flinging it against a concrete wall, burning it with a butane torch, dropping it down four flights of stairs, and attaching it to a car muffler during a lunch outing, and it, well, survived. It didn’t look pretty in the end, but the data was still intact.

Not all is perfect with the Survivor though. Our unit, like others from Corsair, didn’t include any bundled encryption software, although it is supposed to ship with TrueCrypt freeware. Other small problems: One rubber grip wasn’t glued on the unit, and the device made an annoying squeaking noise when closing—not good if two dozen ninjas are parked inside the room you’re about to enter. Still, if speed and durability are your top concerns, we can’t imagine getting a key that’s any tougher than this baby.

Kingwin KH-300

David Murphy — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:02:31 -0500

Let’s set the scene: You just finished “acquiring” every episode of your favorite TV show, and you’re dying for an awesome way to get those files onto your slick new TV. Browsing around the web for a solution, you stumble across Kingwin’s KH-300—an external enclosure that allows you to play multimedia files on a hard drive directly to your TV. You couldn’t be happier.

Fast-forward to the climax: You’re wrong. Kingwin’s enclosure is marred by a number of flaws—from the device’s overall design, to its ugly menu system, to the absurdity of its controls. Add in its inability to play more than a few types of video media—some AVIs, MPEG, DivX, and VCDs—and you have a doorstop, not an innovation.

Putting files on the device is frustrating. For starters, you get just a drive enclosure—no drive. That wasn’t so bad, until we realized that the KH-300 works with only 2.5-inch drives, which no average computer user will ever have lying around. Transferring files is done strictly via USB 2.0, which is fine, save for the counterintuitive fact that you have to turn the device “off” for Windows to recognize it as an external drive.

Connect the device to a TV, and you’ll first get… absolutely nothing. Apparently, the enclosure is preconfigured to output video through only the VGA cable. The only mention of this in the manual is a brief head-nod to the fact that you can change the video output using the “v-mode” button on the remote control. Not. Helpful.

When the KH-300 is finally up and running, the display quality the enclosure spits out is laughable. Pictures look horrible, and the video barely passes for tolerable; the device’s audio support works quite nicely, but that’s hardly a saving grace. With so many awesome ways to get multimedia from your computer to your TV, the only amazing part of the Kingwin enclosure is that someone, somewhere actually believed it was a great idea. We’re speechless.