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.

Fabrik Launches Most Eco-Friendly Storage Ever

David Murphy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:01:00 -0500

We almost didn't believe our eyes, but Fabrik is launching a completely eco-friendly external drive. And by completely, we mean completely. The outer shell of the 500GB Simpletech "Redrive" is constructed of 100-percent recycled aluminum and bamboo. And even the drive's packaging seems to have been designed by a Planeteer: the box itself is made up of 100-percent recyclable material, and there are no extra plastic bags, twist ties, or printed marketing materials of any kind. Even the user instructions for the Redrive itself are printed directly on the box, shown below:

The extra head-nod to the environment will add a mild cost overhead to the drive, priced at $160 for 500GB of storage. Fabrik plans to offer both terabyte and portable versions of the Redrive over the course of the next year. Expect all to share the same high-speed functionality promised in the 500GB version, as Fabrik's using TurboUSB technology--similar to what we've seen in Buffalo's DriveStation Combo 4--to squeeze an extra bit of performance out of the USB connection.

In talking with Fabrik, the company also stressed how it's able to offer the fastest and largest drives on the market. As a third-party distributor of storage products, Fabrik can purchase the underlying hard drives from any vendor it pleases. This allows the company to beat storage manufacturers to the market with a new drive technology, a fact I found rather fascinating. Especially once Fabrik claimed that it was planning on selling the industry's first 1.5 terabyte external storage products. There's no concrete ETA on that, so we'll see if Fabrik's able to live up to its boasting in future months.

Fabrik is also bringing two new portable drives to the market, styled in the same vein as the Simpletech Signature Mini drives we reviewed earlier. The Cayenne and Ice drives will both float in at 250GB capacity points, half that of Simpletech's top storage point, the 500GB Espresso drive. We've included pictures of these two new varieties below:

The Signature Mini USB 2.0 Ice

The Signature Mini USB 2.0 Cayenne

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SimpleTech Redrive

Fabrik Launches Most Eco-Friendly Storage Ever