After Many External Hard Drive Adventures, I Bought A Second One of These
Written: Oct 03 '05 (Updated Aug 19 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nice bang for the buck, great warranty, easy to use software
Cons: Software is SLOW, reliability questions on other Simpletech product (160GB)
The Bottom Line: The price and the warranty make this worth buying.
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| Saxguy's Full Review: SimpleTech STI-USB235/250 250 GB USB 2.0 Hard Driv... |
I’ll admit that I’ve had bad experiences with external hard drives. I had a Maxtor One Touch which did pretty well for a while. Then, it failed, I think due to a virus, while it was under warranty. Maxtor repaired it and it was working again for a while. I had bought another Simpletech unit, their 170GB USB/Firewire product and that was working well.
Then, about 3 months out of warranty, the Maxtor died. For more details, see my updated Maxtor review.
Maxtor external hard drive review
So, at that point, having had good experience to that point with the Simpletech 160gb drive, and noticing that their 250GB drive had a 3 year warranty as opposed to the typical 1 year warranty, I ordered the 250 drive with a USB 2.0 port at $170 with free shipping. I saw no need to spend $37 extra for the unit with a firewire port as well, because USB 2.0 is what I am using.
Obviously, prices have come down tremendously for storage. The Maxtor cost about $1.40 per gig. Less than 2 years later, I am paying $.68 per gig and there are other brands that cost less.
This unit compared favorably with the competition, with specs of 7200rpm spindle speed, 60 megabytes per second transfer rate, 10 MS seek time and 4.17ms latency. It has a fairly small footprint on my desktop. The approximate dimensions are 5.5" x 4" x 1.5". The included cable is about 4 feet, small by most standards, but I have a USB2 hub on the desktop, so that was not an issue.
This unit was truly plug and play upon setup and was ready to go in seconds. It has been functioning quietly and well for the last 3 months or so, the entire time I had it.
One way that it achieves it's quiet is by not having a fan. The heat dissapates through the vents. The Aluminum housing is very warm to the touch but not hot, and I am careful to make sure it has well-ventilated space, not touching the PC or other peripherals.
I have a love/hate relationship with the included Storagesync software. In it’s favor, it is extremely easy to use for both full and incremental backups. I find that selecting files and managing backup parameters is much easier than the Dansk Retrospect Express software bundled with the Maxtor unit. The problem, though, is that it’s SLOW.
Yes, I have an inordinate amount of files, as I have many music files and I decided that I would have full redundancy (two copies of every file) after the Maxtor crash. The software selects files one at a time, reporting the count. Right now, it is taking nearly 5 days to compete a full backup of about 80GB and this is using a Pentium 4 with USB 2.0 data transfer. If that’s what I have to do, I can. The trouble, though, is that I cannot reboot for any reason without starting the backup from scratch. Also, the methodology on the incremental backups is apparently the same. The software does it’s count the same way, so the incremental backups aren’t much faster. The backup functions well on background, without hindering anything else that is going on with the computer. I like this software better than the Dansk product and the Acronis demo I tried, so I am going to stick with it. But care is necessary while the backup is going. A crash and reboot means you will be starting from scratch.
I ordered a second one of these today from Buy.com, after Simpletech was backordered on it. But I did so reluctantly. Why? Well, the Simpletech 160GB unit I bought a little more than a year ago has had a recurring, cycling hum for maybe 3 weeks. That unit is no longer under warranty and the Simpletech tech support rep told me he didn’t know how long it would last. He did say their new units were more reliable and mentioned the 3 year warranty on the 250gb unit. I went back to the review sites and found no reviews of external hard drives that spoke about long term reliability. I checked the warranties on the competitive units, some more expensive, a few less expensive. All the competitive units I found had 1 year warranties. I figured that Simpletech would not have the longer warranty unless they were pretty confident. I also figured that, with full redundancy, I could handle loss of one drive temporarily, if it had to go back for warranty repair.
So, I can recommend this unit as having a great warranty, good bang for the buck and easy to use, while slow, software.
Thanks for reading. God bless!
You might be interested in some of my other reviews:
Canon Pixma IP4300 Photo Printer
Acer 20” Flat Screen Monitor
Lite On SOHW-1673SU DVD±RW Dual Layer Burner
Canon Pixma IP4200 Photo Printer
D-Link DUB-H7 7-port USB2 hub
D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DI-624 Wireless Router
Maxtor 5000 Personal Storage 160GB External Hard Drive
Recommended:
Yes
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