500GB Portable (2.5-inch) HDD Shootout

Affordable and Handy Portable Storage

As notebooks now outsell desktop computers, more folks require a handy storage sidekick to push, pull and share data easily among their many media entertainment devices and PCs at home, as well as systems at the office. We scanned the market prices for portable storage drives and the sweet spot is fast favoring the 500GB capacity point. Typical retail prices at the point of writing hover about the S$150 price point, but it can vary greatly depending on the shop and the actual model in question.

Take note though, when we mean external portable hard drives, we typically mean 2.5-inch drive based solutions. 3.5-inch external drive solutions are more suitable for the desktop due to their bulk and the associated connectivity and features.

We gathered seven of the most popular retail-ready 500GB portable drives available in the market and put them to through a reduced set of benchmarks than our normal hard drive and solid state drive testing. Of course, performance isn't everything in this portable drive space as ease of usability, aesthetics, warranty and support, as well as other handy tools and utilities that make up the entire drive's package count as well. So without further ado, we list the drives involved in this shootout to give you a quick overview of each of them:-

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

Hitachi SimpleTough

The Hitachi SimpleTough portable drive is quite possibly the most robust portable drive we've seen yet. It's so tough, it can be in a league of its own. With an extremely durable hardened rubber shell and even tougher rubber bumpers on both its sides, this drive is both shockproof and water resistant. And unlike other rugged equipment that tend to ignore aesthetics, this is an ergonomically designed drive that's easy on the hands while handling its smooth body and is also pleasing to look at. It also has an integrated, flexible USB cable that fits in with its design and you'll never have to worry about where you stashed the cable. It is however rather short, so the drive has to be placed near your system or you'll have to use a cable extender.

The only other real issue with all this 'toughness' is that it's not going to be as compact as a standard portable drive. While there are other Hitachi external drive models to cater to standard needs, Hitachi chose to send this model in for evaluation amongst the best of the best 500GB portable drives roundup. Here are a few key notes of the drive and it's accompanying materials:-

• Water Resistant
• Shock Proof
• Built-in flexible USB cable (but it's short)
• Hitachi local backup software (auto locates personal media for backup)
• 3 years warranty

Iomega eGo Portable

Once known for the their Zip drives, CD and DVD writers, Iomega has come full circle to embrace the modern storage needs and is rapidly expanding to provide solutions from simple external hard drives to advanced but user-friendly NAS devices. EMC's buyout of Iomega in 2008 is the real catalyst for its rise back into the retail scene as EMC reaches out to new customers and distribution points and able to offer more mainstream solutions (thorough Iomega) in addition to enterprise services. For Iomega, it benefits from EMC's experience and software edge to offer a more robust solution to end-users.

In today's shootout, we have Iomega's eGo Portable series of hard drives which currently come in 320GB and 500GB variants, of which the latter is our concern in this article. Offered in ruby red, silver or blue aluminium enclosures with a simple silver trim around its perimeter, the eGo Portable is quite a looker. While it appears to have a portable drive form factor, it is however not compact enough to be pocketed.

The reason for its slight bulk is because Iomega's Drop Guard protection which assures the drive's reliability for accidental drops up to 1.3 meters in height. If you need even further robustness, this same drive is available in the BlackBelt edition which wraps the drive in cross-shaped rubber sleeve. Besides the drive's ruggedness, Iomega packs in some good software like Iomega's own QuickProtect software for continuous automated backups (PC and Mac compatible but it must be downloaded from their secured site), EMC Retrospect Express backup with data protection and McAfee's VirusScan Plus software (valid for 6 months usage). Probably the only thing we disliked of the drive was the bad placement of the LED drive status indicator and it's too small to be of practical relevance. And so here's the summary:-

• Drop Guard protection (up to 1.3 meters in height)
• Attractive aluminium enclosure
• Bad LED indicator placement and size
• Long USB cable
• McAfee VirusScan Plus (6 months validity for Windows)
• Iomega QuickProtect (continuous automated backups)
• EMC Retrospect Express (backup with data protection)
• 3 years warranty

Samsung S2 Portable

Talk about who made portable hard drives look cool and it's undoubtedly Samsung's S2 Portable series which first debuted a couple of years ago. Small, handy and bling colors to appeal to the ladies, it was hard to resist in its time. Today, its design is still relevant though not as outstanding when it was the only sexy little drive around.

If wine red isn't your taste, the S2 Portable comes in five other colors:- snow white, chocolate brown, piano black, sweet pink and ocean blue. It comes with a simple carry pouch, Samsung's auto backup software and SecretZone feature to store personal data away from prying eyes to those you loan the drive. What we didn't like? A short USB cable and an inappropriately located LED indicator. Ending notes are as follows:-

• Multiple drive color options
• Samsung auto backup software + SecretZone feature
• Carry Pouch
• Short USB cable
• Bad LED indicator placement
• 3 years warranty

Seagate FreeAgent Go

The thinnest portable drive of the lot at just 12.5mm thin, the Seagate FreeAgent Go looks sexy with its sleek aluminium casing and especially when it's powered on as white lights glow from the perforated design. It is however a bit lengthy in dimensions which may not be pocket-friendly.

Aesthetics aside, its retail packaging might be the only sore point of the drive as the clear plastic shell has to be cut carefully to gain access to your new drive - an experience which may be prone to cuts. Once you got your new drive out of the packaging, it has got a fair bit of useful features like the file and folder encryption (128-bit AES), password secured storage, and the Seagate Manager which acts as your diagnostics, backup and synchronization software.

On the drive's expanded ecosystem, Seagate also offers a dock for easy plug-n-play storage and turning your drive from a personal shared storage into a network shared storage. Also, the drive is compatible with Seagate's FreeAgent Theatre series of media players that are designed to comfortably take in the FreeAgent Go drives. These are of course other side considerations to utilize the drive, but primarily, we'll be evaluating the drive for its stand-alone capabilities. Here's a quick summary of pointers:-

• Prominent drive status indication.
• Slimmest portable drive in the market (but not the most compact).
• Seagate Manager (diagnostics, backup, synchronization).
• File and folder encryption (128-bit AES).
• Password protected storage.
• 5 years limited warranty.

Toshiba Portable HDD

Toshiba being in the hard drive manufacturing business, it comes as no surprise that they too have their own series of portable drives to offer. Toshiba has kept their naming scheme rather straightforward, but their drives have quite a glossy and artistic feel to their designs.

Apart from the pretty face, it features a Drive Space Alert function, password-protected data encryption and an internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology on the drive to quickly park the read/write head and actuator arm in safe zone and thus protecting your data and ensuring your drive's operability. NTI backup software is provided for both Mac and Windows based systems. What's there to dislike? In our opinion, it's the short USB cable a lack of proper drive status indication. So to wrap it up:-

• Glossy finish may appeal to some but not all.
• USB cable supplied is too short.
• NTI BackupNow EZ for Windows and NTI Shadow 4 for Mac systems.
• Drive Space Alert.
• Password protected data encryption.
• Internal shock sensor and ramp loading technology to protect the drive.
• 3 years warranty.

Verbatim Executive Portable

Verbatim isn't only in the optical disc media business, but they have their own line of external storage drives for sometime now. For the purpose of this shootout, Verbatim has sent us their top of the line Executive Portable 500GB drive. It's a bit larger than the other drives, but not quite as bulky as the tank-like Hitachi SimpleTough.

 A feature called USB Turbo Speed is Verbatim's main selling point of the Executive Portable. A special driver needs to be installed, which essentially reduces the traditional USB protocol overhead associated and thus allows greater bandwidth utilization. The driver is compatible with Windows 2000, all the way to the latest Windows 7 operating system. The drive's specs also say Mac OS 9 and 10 are supported but we haven't had a chance to verify that. Last but not least, the drive comes bundled with a comprehensive but easy to use Verbatim Sync software. Here are a few other notes and a summary of this drive:-

• USB Turbo Speed (claims 25% higher transfer rates).
• Bulky drive.
• Bad location of LED indicators.
• Long USB cable supplied.
• Carry Pouch supplied.
• Nero BackIt Up 4 Essential software
• Verbatim Sync software (runs from the portable drive with no installation required and secure sync supported with 128-bit SSL).
• 2 years warranty

Western Digital My Passport Essential

Western Digital has the basic Elements series, the mid-range My Passport Essential and much more recently, the top of the line My Passport Elite. Since we gathered the drives prior to the launch of the latter, we've only got the My Passport Essential model to evaluate. Thankfully the differences between them are the added USB dock and a capacity gauge on the Elite drive - features that sometimes come as options on other models and hence would make the Elite more expensive.

The My Passport Essential on the other hand, comes with more practical and more level playing field features that compare well with the competition in this shootout. The bundled WD SmartWare software is your visual control center to backup, retrieving and securing your data. The software is also clever enough to judge the kind of data you have on the drive and presents it in a very easy to digest bar chart representation of how much of each type of data is present on the drive, such as music, movies, documents, etc. This is called Visual Backup. My Passport Essential also features Drive Lock, a 256-bit hardware based data encryption and password protection.

On to the physical aspects of the drive, the WD My Passport Essential has the most desirable form factor for a pocket-able portable drive. It however was supplied with a very short USB cable and its hard drive activity LED is just too small to be useful. One other note is its use of a micro-USB instead of a mini-USB that most others use.

• Pocket-friendly form factor
• USB cable supplied is too short.
• Drive activity LED is too small to be effective.
• WD SmartWare software (automatic continuous backup, visual backup).
• Drive Lock (256-bit hardware based encryption + password protection).
• 3 years warranty.

Test Setup

All the drives in this review were tested using the following system configuration. Take note that we tested the Verbatim drive with the USB Turbo Speed drivers installed for all tests.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz)
• MSI 975X PowerUp Edition (Intel 975X Express chipset)
• 2GB DDR2-667 RAM
• XpertVision GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB (ForceWare 186.18)
• Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1
  
   

Benchmarks

Since these are external personal storage drives for backup and transition purposes, we didn't stress test them as much as we would have done so with local internal storage drive and NAS drives. As such we ran a reduced benchmark workload as listed below.

• CrystalMark 2004R3
• PCMark Vantage
• HD Tune Pro 3.5

Results - CrystalMark 2004R3

Just as Verbatim claimed, there's a notable performance increase of 12 to 15% using the USB Turbo Speed drivers instead of the operating system's default drivers to access the Verbatim Executive Portable drive. Seagate held up the rear in this test while the rest are generally tied and topped out at the same performance level.

Results - PCMark Vantage

Next we used PCMark Vantage to find out how these drives fared in real-world scenarios by focusing on the hard drive test suite. These tests range from gaming performance, to loading applications and media creation performance - all in all, testing a mix of read/write performance whose blend varies in each of the test scenarios. We would like to add that most of these scenarios aren't usually performed on an external hard drive, but there are times when users might just work off or execute stuff directly from the portable drive for the sake of convenience. Hence this benchmark will reveal how these drives cope to these ad-hoc needs.

As seen below, the Verbatim drive's lead isn't as pronounced in these tests as it tends to excel in sequential transfers where it can flex its overhead bandwidth thanks to its specialized drivers. Still, when pitted against the slowest drive, it does manage a 15% performance lead which is pretty decent. Apart from Verbatim's souped up drive, Hitachi, Seagate and Toshiba had decent performance too.

Results - HD Tune Pro 3.5

Tuning in to HD Tune's results where we got a better handle sequential/random read performance as well as access times. We had to forego write tests as it would completely wipe all existing data off the drive and we needed to return them back as they were provided. Since part of the write performance can be seen from CrystalMark, there's no big loss here for this class of drives.

Stating off with sequential read results, we found that they mimicked our findings from CrystalMark earlier. Random average read speeds were however a bit surprising as Verbatim didn't come out tops here, but rather Samsung did and was closely followed by Toshiba and Verbatim. Iomega was pulling up the rear once again, while Seagate and Hitachi had middling performance here. Suffice to say if you're going to be mostly reading and writing blocks of data continuously like large file copying, you would be more concerned with sequential performance.

Next up is sequential and random access times and we found both Iomega and Hitachi drives faring poorly compared to the rest here.

Who's the Best Portable Drive?

Well, we've laid out the pros and cons of each drive, ran the drives through some benchmarks and it is now time to piece all the information together to single out the overall best. This is of course based on our findings and placing equal importance to all aspects of a drive from physique, performance, features and overall value. In reality however, each individual has their own preferences and needs, thus the reason why there are several vendors offering you a variety of options and unique selling points.

So do take our assessment as a guide if you're not quite sure what you need. However if you're the sort who knows his/her requirements such as the speediest drive or the lightest drive for example, we've got all the information and it's just a matter of homing in to the right option that fits your needs. Here then is our breakdown of how the seven 500GB portable hard drives fared in our assessment:-

 

The Hitachi SimpleTough lived up to its 'tough' billing with its sturdy build that's shockproof and water resistant. For rugged usage on the go, this is the best drive. Alas, its upsides are also the reason why it's so bulky and thus not a suitable candidate for everyone. However, if you're going to be lugging a drive in your bag without care of concern, the Hitachi SimpleTough can surely take a lot of rough handling and won't look like it's been mishandled either thanks to its build and finishing. Be prepared to have a USB extension cable if you need to stretch behind a desktop to get it connected.

Want a slimmer drive than Hitachi but yet hope it's reasonably tough? Iomega's eGo Portable series advertises its 1.3-meter drop friendly feature and has 3 years warranty. It's not water resistant nor is it a great performer, but it does come with a good software set and presents itself as a reasonably good value buy for someone who needs durability, good looks and a palatable price point.

Samsung's S2 Portable might have been the game changer a couple of years back with cheeky colors and a squarish shape that appeals to women, but it isn't the only good looker in town these days. While it's almost a pocket friendly drive, it's not quite as slim as the WD contender. Aside from a good design, its features and offerings are bit lean and leaves you wanting a little more. How about a good location for the drive status activity indicator for starters? Don't get us wrong, it's a decent drive, but there's nothing very compelling about it either. This is one of those drives where you make an impulse purchase based on appearances - you won't go wrong, but you won't get a lot of worth either.

Still the only drive with a 5-year warranty, this is one of Seagate's biggest trump cards for all its products. Though the Seagate FreeAgent Go recorded middling performance and sometimes holding up the rear of the performance graphs, it redeems itself with the best warranty coverage, good build and a very visible drive activity indicator. It's a safe buy if you need the added warranty assurance and sleek design. Did we also mention it's the most affordable of the pack? All things considered, it's great value for money and we're going to give it our Best Value award.

Toshiba's Portable hard drive is a compact and glossy drive that's relatively decent all around. Unfortunately it doesn't quite stand out in any particular way and has a short USB cable provided. Furthermore, those who hate the glossy finish for fear of smudgy fingerprint maintenance would steer probably stay clear away from this model even though it comes with a cleaning cloth.

If speed is all you crave, the fastest drive in this shootout is undoubtedly the Verbatim Executive Portable drive. It comes with a special turbo driver that maximizes the USB protocol for speedier transfer rates as opposed to the competition. The net result is more than 10% speed gain in most cases. As impressive as it may seem, it's also one of the bulkier drives and has a poorly positioned drive activity indicator.

Finally, the most pocket friendly drive of the lot is the Western Digital My Passport Essential, which is also our overall winning choice of this shootout. While its compact nature alone warrants enough reason to grab this drive, it's a good thing that the overall features and performance is in good standing. Furthermore, it has hardware based drive encryption and password protection which should come in handy for those of us who are pretty concerned with data safety these days. Now if only it had a more obvious drive activity indicator and a longer USB cable supplied, it would have been perfect.

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