Hitachi X320 Mobile Drive

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PRODUCT REVIEW

Pocket-sized drive

By Paisal Chuenprasaeng

The Nation

The Hitachi X320 Mobile Drive could be your perfect companion if you need to work on a notebook computer on the go, or if you need to transfer huge amounts of data between home and office.

The mobile hard drive is compact and light and can fit conveniently into your shirt pocket.

The X320 is available in two colours - red and black. The one tested here looked good, with its black, smooth-textured body and curved ends. It is designed to fit on to a curved stand so that LED lights underneath can be seen when data is being read from and written to the drive.

The drive needs no external power. It is powered by a USB 2.0 port (with a cable provided), so it is convenient to carry around. No driver is required either. You simply plug it into a USB 2.0 port and it is ready for use as a storage drive.

I measured its reading and writing speeds using SiSoftware Sandra Lite 2010 and it gave a good performance. Its bandwidth was 480 megabits per second, with 3,181 operations per second, overall.

When Sandra tested it with a 256-megabyte file, it achieved a reading performance of 34.13 megabytes per second and a writing speed of 31.33 megabytes per second.

I transferred a movie folder of 43.5 gigabytes from a notebook to the X320 and it took about 25 minutes, which I thought was an acceptable speed.

The X320 is rated with 320GB space. Its actual capacity after format is 298GB.

The Hitachi X320 Mobile Drive retails for Bt2,290.

Key specifications: Hitachi X320 Mobile Drive

Dimensions (mm): 121.9 x 83.3 x 22.6

Weight: 290.3 grams

Operating temperature: 5 to 35 degrees celsius

Relative humidity: 20 to 80 per cent, non-condensing

System requirements: Windows 7, Vista, XP; Macintosh Mac OS X 10.3 or newer

-- The Nation 2010-02-16

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