SanDisk: World's First Push Button Backup USB Drive

Benson Hong — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:40:36 -0600

With the simple touch of a button, SanDisk has created a solution to easily back up crucial files on your flash drive. SanDisk has announced today that their Ultra Backup USB drive will be available in capacities ranging from 8GB to 64GB with prices between $40 and $200. This patent-pending backup technology has a backup capacity of up to 64GB, more than enough space to store any important files you may have. The introduction of this new one-button backup technology alongside its already-popular dual layer of both password protection and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hardware encryption will make this one of the safest flash drives around.

SanDisk didn’t forget about their classics, though. The Cruzer underwent a facelift and is now sporting a new contemporary look featuring a sliding, cap-less USB connector. What hasn’t changed is the continuation of U3 technology allowing users to run applications directly off the drive.

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.

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SanDisk: World's First Push Button Backup USB Drive

Toshiba 320GB Portable Drive