ADATA DashDrive Durable HD710 review

Take one look at the DashDrive Durable 500GB and it’s clear it is designed to take some punishment. It’s a rubber-coated portable hard disk that has been tested to the toughest military standards and is able to withstand being submerged in meter-deep water for up to 30 minutes, which is an impressive feat. ADATA also claims that it conforms to the US military MIL-STD-810G drop test. This official test states mobile equipment must survive a drop from 1.22m -we knocked off our desk and it lived to tell the tale. Its USB3 data transfer cable conveniently wraps around the edge of the drive.

Adata provides a link to its HDDtoGO software in the box – it’s a basic tool that can synchronise particular folders between your desktop and the disk, but it’s no replacement for a dedicated backup program.. It also comes formatted in FAT32, rather than NTFS, which means Mac owners can start saving their files to it right away, but if you’ll be using it exclusively with Windows it makes sense to reformat to NTFS. If you do, you’ll end up with 465GB of usable space.

Performance over USB3 was fairly average – the DashDrive could write large files at 67.2MB/s and read them at 75.9MB/s. Small files were a bigger challenge, where it could write at 22.6MB/s and read at 36.2MB/s. We also tested the larger 1TB version and saw large file write speeds of 89MB/s and read speeds 101.6MB/s, so performance was quicker than the smaller capacity. Small write speeds were a slightly disappointing 16.7MB/s whereas read speeds were every-so-slightly faster at 39.6MB/s. 

At 13p per gigabyte for the 500GB version, it’s slightly more expensive than other, non-rugged portable disks, and the absence of any backup software is a shame, but if you want the reassurance that a knock or drop won’t wipe out your backed-up files, the DashDrive is a good choice. For most people, the fast-performing and well-priced Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB is the better choice.