SimpleTech Pininfarina 500GB External Drive Review

While the SimpleDrive doesn't immediately look like an automobile, there are several similarities to take notice of, the first of which being the smooth lines of the body. The nose of the drive is gradually slanted down and the bottom also lightly reaches up to meet it at a point, while the back of the unit where the connectors and power switch are comes straight up at a 90 degree angle giving a firm sense of direction. You could say the SimpleDrive is aerodynamic, although I'd advise against throwing it to find out.

Continuing the likenesses to an automobile are the three distinctive slits on either side of the drive, acting as side air intakes which actually work well with the air current silently being fanned out through the rear vent holes to make for cool operation. Last but not least to round out the design is the SimpleDrive's glossy paint job. There are four colors to choose from, each of which corresponds to its own capacity. Fire Red for the 160GB drive, Pearl White for 250GB, Onyx Black for 500GB, and Charcoal Silver/Gray for the soon-to-be-released 750GB and 1TB models. As with just about every glossy paint job, fingerprint smudges are a constant battle, although the divine reflections offered by the hard drive are enough to instill the affection traditionally earned by red staplers.

Status Check
On top of the drive are four blue light emitting diodes that form a ring around the SimpleTech logo, the center of which actually doubles as the one-hit backup button. When data is being transferred to and from the drive, the LEDs will go around in circles to indicate activity. Strangely enough, the LEDs move at 42 revolutions per minute, a rather special number in its own right.

In addition to this, the four LEDs also work together as a capacity meter to give a rough idea of the free space available upon powering up the drive. Unlike traditional meters that light up as more data is moved to the drive, the SimpleDrive's capacity meter works in reverse, that is as more data is stored, fewer LEDs will light. When less than 10% of the drive's freespace remains, a smaller red LED will blink in place of the blue LEDs. Also unlike the meters available on Lexar's JumpDrive Mercury, the included drivers must be installed on the computer for the capacity meter to give a proper reading.

Cross Platform Backups
Pre-loaded on the drive are the setup files for ArcSoft's TotalMedia Backup & Record, as well as the One-Click button manager software and driver. These files are not included on the documentation CD, so I recommend that you either back them up to your own hard drive or burn them to a CD for safe keeping.

Since the drive is pre-formatted for NTFS, Mac users will need to copy the backup software to their desktop and then reformat the drive for either FAT32 or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in order to actually write to the drive. Once formatted, simply open the two .DMG images and install the software.

While there are a few differences between the Mac and PC versions of the software, the basic backup and restore functionality is the same. There are scheduled and one-time backups, which can be configured in one of three ways: multimedia files, personal documents, and advanced backups. Multimedia will automatically scour your computer for typical files with photo, video, and audio extensions, although *.ogg and *.m4p (music purchased from the iTunes Music Store) are notably absent. Personal documents will also scour the drives for selected extensions, although here it's possible to add your own categories in addition to typical office document file-types and the aforementioned multimedia categories.

Advanced backups are what I tend to rely on, as they're faster to complete and give finer control over which folders are backed up. Furthermore, they can be password protected for increased security.

Opening the options menu will reveal additional configurations for each of the backup types, including which drives to search through, whether or not to scan the Program Files and Windows folders, excluding files under a certain size, and whether or not to enable compression. For advanced backups, it's also possible to exclude certain filetypes here as well.

Once the content has been selected for backup, it's simply a matter of scheduling it, and selecting either a full or incremental backup. Restoring backups is also straightforward. Select the backup you wish to restore from, mark the files to be restored, and choose whether you wish to restore to the original location of the file or a separate folder.

More Than Just Backups
The Windows version of TotalMedia Backup & Restore comes with a few surprises, namely its ability to burn CDs and DVDs. In addition to backing up data to hard drives, it can use optical media as a destination, and the same can be said with restoring files. But wait, it gets better.

It seems that the program doubles as a cheap alternative to full-fledged burning suites, as regular data CD/DVD writing and copying is also enabled, along with creating and burning virtual CD images in the *.AIB and *.ISO formats. And while there's no DVD authoring program built in, TotalMedia Backup & Record can also burn off VIDEO_TS folders to DVDs.

Music lovers also got some attention, as support for duplicating, ripping and burning music CDs is also included. For those with WMA/MP3 CD players like those found in some car stereos, Jukebox CDs can also be created to maximize the number of songs per disc. Unfortunately, Jukebox mode does not seem to support using folders for organization.

Personally I'll stick with the full-fledged burning suites such as Nero and Sonic/Roxio as they both give more control over just how I burn my data, while providing basic movie and DVD authoring utilities. Still, the no-frills burning abilities are a welcome add-on, and would probably do nicely for those with simpler burning needs that don't wish to spend lots of money on a high end suite.

Performance
The SimpleDrive External Hard Drive's performance was on-par with other external hard drives, holding out around the 30MBps mark, typical for USB 2.0. SimpleTech has announced plans for a SimpleDrive Deluxe edition that will include a FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394a) port for faster sustained read and write speeds. Unfortunately eSATA, the fastest consumer-grade connection available for external hard drive enclosures, will not be making an appearance it appears.

Moving on to the benchmarks, we can see in SiSoftware Sandra that the SimpleDrive managed lows and highs of 28MBps and 32MBps during the read test, averaging 30.8MBps. The estimated random access seek time was recorded at 13 milliseconds.

SiSoftware Sandra

Recap
Overall I was rather impressed with SimpleTech's latest incarnation of the SimpleDrive External Hard Drive. The smooth lines by Pininfarina are outstanding, the high gloss paint job is much more visually appealing than the drab matte paint jobs I'm used to seeing, and the fan's cool yet silent operation is reassuring for the drive's longetivity. ArcSoft's easy to manage cross-platform backup utility is also a welcome addition with a few pleasant surprises of it's own for Windows users. The only two things lacking with the new SimpleDrive are the write speed at a sullen 22.5MBps and the absence of a FireWire or eSATA connection at its price point.