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Wednesday June 6, 2007
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 Hitachi's jumping on the personal USB-attached storage bandwagon, retail-style. The company announced on Tuesday a new expanded strategy that will begin with the launch of Hitachi-branded external and portable USB storage products, the company said.
These drives will be sold through Best Buy starting today and will come in a range of capacities, including a whopping 1-Tbyte version for the external storage drive.
That drive, know as the "easy hard drive," also comes in 750-Gbyte and 500-Gbyte flavors and will include a USB 2.0 cable, power supply, and pre-installed back up software that will work on both Macs and PCs, according to Hitachi.
The Portable version comes with the same software, but features 250-, 200-, and 160-Gbyte capacities. Hitachi says the External USB Storage drive will ship with a power adapter while the Portable USB Storage version will be powered through the USB cable.
Pricing for the "easy hard drives" was not immediately available, however, a quick survey of Best Buy's Web site reveals that the portable USB drives fall into the $250, $220, and $140 price ranges for the 250-, 200-, and 160-Gbyte versions.
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April 30, 2008 1:51 PM
I just bought the 160GB model of this drive for $49.95 from BestBuy, and was looking around for reviews of it, but only found this announcement.
So I'll give a short review based on the 45 minutes I've had it out of the box.
Interestingly, the drive needs the 2 USB connections in your computer (presumably for power). The only issue was connecting the provided Y-USB connector cable to my computer, as this cable is barely a foot long. So you'll need to place the drive very near your computer, or an external hub as I did.
My computer (PC running WinXP SP2) recognized the drive immediately, which was nice.
The drive has space for almost the entire 160GB they advertise, with a little space taken up by the backup software that comes included on the drive. Other drives come with a bit less than advertised, so this was a nice find.
You still have to install that included backup software (ArcSoft's TotalMedia Backup), but my experience was that it installed easily. The software is pretty minimal (I'm a computer geek, so could use more features), but it'll do the job. It has 3 pre-defined sets of backups: Photos, Videos and Music; Personal Documents; and Advanced Backup. The first two backup sets pre-define the backup based on the types of files to back up (e.g. *.doc, *.xls, *.jpg) and let you add your own file types if your needs extend beyond the standards. The third sets, Advanced Backup, lets you specify directories to include or exclude from the backup. This will let you catch what the first type sets might miss.
You can define a backup schedule, choosing which of the three sets to back up. When scheduled a monitoring program starts when you boot Windows and runs in your system tray. When the appropriate time arrives, it starts your backup.
You can define your backups to be full (recommended for the first backup) or incremental (where only the changed files are saved to the new backup file.
Looks pretty easy, eh? I think the drives are well-named on that basis.
On the negative side, the initial, full backup I'm doing is taking a long time. I selected Personal Documents and it says it's backing up 1.81 GB of files, but it's been over 10 minutes. I haven't done any performance test on the drive yet, so I can't say if the cause is the software or hardware. But I can say that it took a bit of time to start copying anything to the Hitachi drive (probably combining all files into one big backup file on my main hard drive? Anyway, I started the backup about 10 minutes before I started writing this review, and the progress bar only says 16% done.
We'll see.
Either way I think I got a good deal for my $50.
April 30, 2008 4:00 PM
A brief update. I posted the above review just over 2 hours ago, and that 1.81 GB backup I'd started was still only 62% done! Talk about slow.
Still no clue whether it's the drive or the software, but I cancelled the backup 2 minutes ago and it still hasn't actually quit yet. I guess I'll be using so other software at least!