Priced considerably under $60, the ExcelStor drive from China with 60 GB is an obvious low-cost model. Since that's the most important criteria for some users, we included the drive in our field of candidates.

Despite our initial skepticism, the performance of the J360 proved to be solid. Regarding average seek times as well as data-transfer rates, the J360 comes in not far behind the well-known brands. Particularly in the I/O benchmarks, ExcelStor is right up there and leaves some competitors in its dust.

Then again, the application benchmarks Business and Highend Disk Winbench 99 2.0 paint a less rosy picture - ExcelStor brings up the rear in both.