Another winner from Verbatim

Introduction

I've mentioned before that the market is crammed with USB drives. The world and his dog are churning them out. Another quick squint on eBuyer shows over 100 different drives for sale at this moment from a 160Gb one for £33 (about 20% cheaper than a few months ago) all the way up to a 2Tb one for £184 (about 25% cheaper than a few months ago).

Somewhere near the higher end of that list you have 500 Gb Verbatim Executive Portable Hard Drive, which retails at £100, but you can find it for around £80 online. It's small enough to fit in pockets, bags and the like. It comes with a nice neoprene carrying case which will protect it from little bumps and scratches. It has a spindle speed of 5400rpm and a Samsung disk inside...

Set Up

As with all good USB devices it's a doddle. Plug it in, give it a minute or so to be recognised. And you're ready to go.

You can also install the optional Verbatim Sync software (which is ready to be installed from the drive, no CD required). It's not required if you are just using this like any piece of portable storage, but it has some nice features that you may be interested in. The most important one (and the one that's prominent on the box) is the "turbo USB" option, which claims to speed transfers by up to 25%.

You can sync Outlook/Windows Mail contacts and calendar entries, as well as files, photos and the usual other stuff. You can also set up 128-bit AES encrypted folders (with password protection) to protect sensitive information. It's not exactly BS7799 or ISO/IEC 27002, but if you have some vaguely sensitive information that you want to leave on a train, in a skip, in a taxi or wherever, at least it's a bit harder for newspapers to read your data and find out your secrets.

The Verbatim Executive also comes with Nero BackItUp 4 Essentials (also on the drive) to help you to manage your backups. You can back up your files and then leave it to "watch" your folders, and incrementally back up any changed files. As with most back up software, this is a very good thing for most users since "forgetting to back up" is a common complaint. As long as you've set it up and plugged it in, this little drive will back up all of your files for you.

Use

It's another drive on your computer, so you can just drag and drop stuff around as usual, or use the Verbatim software to copy stuff around. It's all very easy to use and pretty quick. As a test I transferred around 50Gb of music, documents and photos in around 50 minutes. The "turbo USB" option does appear to speed things up between 15 and 20%, depending on what you are transferring. It's a cracking bit of performance from a pocket sized USB drive.

Conclusion

Do you need an external USB drive? Chances are that nowadays you probably do. With photos, videos and audio all being increasingly stored in electronic form, you're always going to need some more space. Or you'll want to take a back up of all those treasured memories in those photos, videos and music files that you spent weeks digitising from your 1,000+ CD collection that's now in storage in the loft.

It's small, it's light, it fits in your pocket. Whilst it doesn't have the Apple-style looks of the Seagate FreeAgent Go, it does have a look of class with its all black finish, complemented by subtle blue LEDs on either side. But looks really don't matter, it's just another piece of storage. You can take it anywhere. You don't need a power cable as it's powered from USB.

This is a cracking little piece of hardware at a competitive price.