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High Quality at Affordable Price

If you are looking for a high quality portable external USB-powered high capacity hard drive at an affordable price, this is your choice!

Ownership: 5 days.

Pros:
1. High quality as SimpleTech is using a Western Digital (WD) internal hard drive disk (HDD) known to be a state-of-the-art HDD.
2. As portable (small size and light) as WD passport.
3. USB-powered or bus-powered. As single USB port of some computers can not provide enough power, SimpleTech is providing you with USB 2.0 Y-cable (not provided with WD passport) which can be used to hook up your drive to two USB ports of your computer to get enough power. This drive also has a power port (power cable is not provided, however, WD passport has no power port at all) in case you prefer to use a power cable. However, My laptop (almost 5 years old now) does not need it! I hook up this drive to a single USB port of my laptop and it works. I am so happy after knowing this as I was afraid to buy this drive considering that it may not work with a single USB port (my laptop has only two USB ports so that I would run out of it and not be able to use any other USB device, like mouse at the same time)! Make sure you use the main USB (not the pigtail, take a look at the picture above). WD will make you buy an expensive Y-cable if you need it. Moreover, this Y-cable from SimpleTech is longer than USB cable from WD.
4. Highest capacity portable drive available as of today (comparable to WD 320 GB passport).
5. I bought it from Amazon marketplace (ZENCORP) for $ 97.99 plus $ 6.49 S&H (no tax). The merchant offered the best price as of that day. I ordered it on Friday, merchant shipped (from MD) it on Saturday via DHL, and I received (at CA) it on Monday with excellent packaging! You can not possibly get this awesome deal for WD 320 GB passport right now.
6. Plug N play just like WD passport. My laptop immediately recognized this drive (also 3 of my school desktops, all of them required only one USB port) when I hooked up for the 1st time.
7. Hot-swappable just like WD passport.
8. Great look! After all, designed by Pininfarina! To me, WD passport does not look any better.
9. USB port of this drive is naked which is good because I always felt awkward in handling WD passport’s port (WDXMS2500CN, bought from Costco) as it has a flap on it. WD made USB port naked only in their newest model (WDME3200TN).
10. Blue light shows that HDD is connected to the computer as a local disk, flashes when working, red light shows that power is on! WD passport indicator light does not show you these details.
11. 3 years warranty, just like WD passport’s. Very important.
12. Did not try the software, but back-up and other utilities like simple, automatic backups with Fabrik local backup and complete protection with Fabrik ultimate backup online service (2 GB free), joggle software for organizing photos, songs, and video come with it. Will comment after use.
13. Free tech support over the phone. WD’s tech support is available for free only upto 30 days after you give them the 1st call. WD’s tech support guys know (including the higher level, really annoying) as much as you do being an ordinary person with some standard technical understanding.
14. PC/Mac compatible just like WD passport.
15. Base has pad-like structure to protect the drive.
16. It is as quiet and fast as WD passport. Its stays cool just like WD passport.
17. Pre-formatted to NTFS as compared to FAT32 (WD passport). Most people use PC rather than Mac!

Cons: Not many! I believe pros simply wins over cons.
1. As scratchable as WD passport.
2. 5400 rpm only, however, this is the highest speed available for all portable drives including WD’s.
3. Capacity is not as high as that of larger drives.
4. No firewire 400/800 or eSATA or 10/100/1000 ethernet ports. You can not possibly expect these with portable drives.
Make sure you buy a carrying case, the best being from case LOGIC (model # PHDC-1) in order to protect the drive and for carrying convenience.
There are other portable drives in the market, say, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Iomega, HP, Maxtor, but none of them are better than this one. I own this and I owned WD passport (WDXMS2500CN) and returned it.

Did I say enough about this excellent gadget? Buy one and enjoy it!!!

UPDATE: 11/20/2009: The drive is still working. Only problems are 1) occasionally, it does not work with some computers (even the recent ones) with a single USB connection, you have to use two ports. 2) sometimes, when I connect this with computer, this device behaves as if it were connected to a slow USB (1.1) port, therefore, copying files takes forever. I disconnect and reconnect this, and it behaves normal. I have been advised by ST representative (over the phone) that this may be a controller issue and I should go for an RMA. I will see. I still have valid warranty for some good time.

UPDATE: 12/20/2009: I returned the drive to Hitachi for repair/exchange with an RMA. They got me a new drive (color is not black cherry now, but kind of red, still looks good) and I am happy to report that it looks like they have fixed the issues. So far I have hooked up this with 2 desktops and 1 laptop with success (in which the old drive was having issues). To return the drive, I have used flat-rate ($4.95) box from USPS, therefore, the guys who are complaining about this drive after purchase should do just like I did if the warranty is still valid (3 yrs).

Update (2/9/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, SimpleTech by Hitachi Signature Mini250 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive FS-U25/250G Ice Electronics, was written by mukhi.

The average rating for this item is 3.3 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.