S500U SimpleTech by, Rugged fast and inexpensive
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Rugged fast and inexpensive
I bought this drive several months ago and it has exceeded my expectations. It is plug and play and has fast transfer. If it locks up I unplug it and plug it back in and it is ready to go. I recently bought a 1TB Western Digital My Book drive and it has been a nightmare compared to this one. It worked for a couple days and then quit. I think it was not able to be unplugged and plugged back in without getting errors. It gave me the “Blue Screen of Death” and while the videos remained and could be played on my Phillips DVD player my XP computer still says Death every time I try to plug it in. XP has an icon in the lower right tray to safely remove hardware, and I use it now. I am buying another one of these as it has been so reliable.
Update (2/9/2012): I also found some auctions for this item here.
The featured review for this product, SimpleTech by Hitachi SimpleDrive 500 GB Turbo USB 2.0 External Hard Drive S500U Black Electronics, was written by Cristy Brandstedter.
The average rating for this item is out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.
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Tags: 500 gb, backup drive, external hard drive, external hd, external storage, hard drive, hard drives, mac, osx, simpletech, usb
Posted on: June 27, 2010
Filed under: Reviews
Reviews (3)
R. Khan
June 7th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Deceived by Low Price (S1000U)
I don’t know what weird logic made SimpleTech think that leaving out the power switch, and automatically starting up with the computer saves electricity. Although auto-shutdown is nice and convenient since I sometimes forget to switch off my drives, they should not have left out the power switch normally found on other external drives. Using this drive just for backup, it only needs to be on when performing a backup, not the whole time the computer is on. I need a power switch to turn off the drive when not using it to save electricity, and reduce wear and tear on the drive. It’s too much trouble to be unplugging cables. I had to open up the drive case and manually mount my own power switch and solder the connections to the board. If I knew about this before buying it, I would not have bought it.
The drive case contains a Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EAVS hard drive. The hard drive itself has no warranty from Western Digital. This means if your hard drive fails after the measly SimpleTech 1 year warranty (which hard drives often do), you’re screwed.
Its “sleek” design makes it hard to stack one drive on top the other, increasing the chances of the drive falling down and becoming damaged.
One good thing was the price where I bought it, but considering the very small warranty period, it may cost more in the long run. The Western Digital power-saving hard drive is also a plus, since USB data throughput is too low for normal high speed drives, but when you consider the lack of the power switch, this benefit would be negated. This low-power Western Digital hard drive is the real reason the drive runs cool and silent without fans, not the vents that SimpleTech boasts about. Put a regular drive in there and it will burn up.
At least I had no problem getting it to work.
Cristy Brandstedter
June 18th, 2010 at 7:59 am
Rugged fast and inexpensive
Rated 5 stars.
Amber Benedict
June 25th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
Great For Mac!
I’ve been converting my VHS tapes into iMovie (digital format) which takes up a lot of space, so I needed an external but I didn’t want to spend hundreds. I went though 2 other external hard drives and had a hard time making them mac compatible. The SimpleDrive came with clear computer instudctions and setup was so easy! This is a great product for a great price.
The only down side is that it has to remain plugged in the wall when in use, which is fine if you have a desk top, but it was a pain to carry around with my laptop.
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