ADATA DashDrive Durable 500GB review

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Verdict:

You pay a little extra for durability, but it could be worth it if you’re accident prone

Review Date: 17 Aug 2012

Price when reviewed: £65

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Tom Morgan

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

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. 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.

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.

At 13p per gigabyte, 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, fast-performing and well-priced Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB is the better choice.

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