By guest editor Michael Nguyen
I showed off the device around at work and most of the feedback I got for it was; “Wow, is that an external drive?” quickly followed by; “Oh wow, designed by Pininfarina”. For the record, I workwith co-workers who are used to seeing gizmos and other electronic gadgets. And, still, the SimpleDrivePS caused quite a bit of buzz.
Windows and MacOS – and maybe more!
The SimpleDrive works on Windows and MacOS X, obviously, but also on some Linux flavored OS like Ubuntu if you know how to mount the drive. Mac users have an extra step before they can write on the SimpleDrive; it needs to be reformatted as Mac OS Extended volume. If the SimpleDrive will be shared between a Windows and a Mac computer, reformatting the drive using FAT file system will enable read/write access for both environments.
Power it on
To get the SimpleDrive up and running, I tried a couple of different ways. First, I tried to connect the device to a self powered USB hub, IOgear. I had to use both USB connectors on the cable to get it to work. Second, when connected directly to the USB ports on the motherboard, only the “Power and Signal” plug was needed. There is a power plug or DC-IN jack available on the back of the unit, however the AC power adapter was not provided. Once powered it was properly and quickly detected by Windows and was ready to go. No surprise though, since the device was already NTFS formatted.
Performance
Our test protocol was very straightforward. We benchmarked the three core disk operations; READ, WRITE and READ/WRITE. The data that we moved around was the content of my “World of Warcraft” folder – a fairly big sized folder with 6,142 files, 1,1272 folders, and 8.29GB (8,911,757,312 Bytes). The other storage unit, referenced as C_DRIVE, was a local RAID0 of two 10K RPM WD Raptor.
Results
- C_Drive to SimpleDrive: 10:25:82 / 14.2 MBps
- SimpleDrive to C_DRIVE: 9:34:38 / 15.5 MBps
- SimpleDrive to SimpleDrive: 19:54:04 / 7.5 MBps
We ran another benchmark with HDTach 3.0, where the numbers were close enough to confirm our results and these were solid numbers for a portable storage unit.
Backup Software included
StorageSync Professional Edition is included with the SimpleDrive. It offers a wide range of capabilities, including Backup and Restore, file synchronization, Media Profiler and Auto-Launch. The special ones are: Compression, Data Encryption and File Revision. A couple of weaknesses, though, are that the software only detects local drives and not shared or network drives, and that backups can not be automated or scheduled. You can, however, set a reminder through StorageSync.
FREE 2GB online space with MyFabrik.com
SimpleDrive comes with 2GB of free space on MyFabrik.com. Go to simple.myfabrik.com and enter the serial number printed on the tamper proof label. The application is much more that just an online storage. It offers a variety of tools to manage your online files, such as sharing your content, building slideshows and also embedding your media into other websites like eBay, Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace, Blogger and Xanga, to name a few. The good news is everyone else gets 1GB by registering for a free account on myfabrik.com – not bad.
Conclusion
I have used few external drives and here is what I like with the SimpleDrive and how I would use it. It has to be one of the quietest external drives I have put my hands (or ears) on. The non-slip pads on the bottom keep the unit sturdy on any surface. You don’t want your device to move around especially when it is reading or writing data to the platters. No bulky AC Power to carry around, which makes the SimpleDrive a great portable device. Ideally, you want to have two sets of USB cables – one permanently connected to your computer and another to carry along with the unit. Although it can be used a backup unit, because it is lightweight, quiet and small, and has 250GB of drive space, I believe you’ll get more out of it as a portable storage unit.
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