Event Coverage

HWM+HardwareZone.com Editor's Choice Tech Awards - Part 1

By Team HardwareZone - 10 Feb 2010

Best 2.5-inch Portable External HDD

Best 2.5-inch Portable External HDD

As data consumption trends rise, data backup trends follow suit too. It's no surprise portable hard drives are a dime a dozen with capacities reaching up to 1TB these days. While capacities are going up, physical designs are getting more compact to pocket these portable drives easier as well. For our comparison to crown the best 2.5-inch portable external HDD, we chose a capacity point that offers the widest variety and the biggest are 500GB drives.

Nominees

  • Hitachi Simple Tough
  • Iomega eGo Portable 500GB
  • Samsung S2-500
  • Seagate FreeAgent Go
  • Toshiba Portable Drive
  • Verbatim Executive Portable
  • WD My Passport Essential

And the Winner is

The WD My Passport Essential 500GB is our best 2.5-inch portable external HDD.

From our suite of performance testing, Verbatim's Executive Portable drive consistently came out as our top performer thanks to its Turbo USB speed feature. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite a portable drive as compared to many other models. Overall features, bundled software, accessories, portability and other physical aspects are equally important for a good portable drive that's supposed to appeal to the masses.

After careful consideration of these various aspects, WD's My Passport Essential was our choice as the best 2.5-inch portable external HDD. Its consistent performance and ultra compact size are really the main highlights of this drive. As usual our selective choice of benchmarks and scoring table are enclosed here for your viewing.

Criteria/Model Hitachi SimpleTough Iomega eGo Portable Samsung S2 Portable Seagate FreeAgent Go Toshiba Portable HDD Verbatim Executive Portable WD My Passport Essential
Physique 8 7.5 8.5 8.5 8 7 9
Features 9 8.5 7 9 7.5 8.5 8
Performance 7.5 7 8 7 8 9 8
Value 8 8.5 7.5 9 7.5 7.5 8
Overall 8.5 8 7.5 8.5 7.5 8 8.5
Price S$199 S$159 S$179 S$169 S$165 S$175 S$159

For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed at the References section at the end.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.