Samsung S2 Portable 500 GB (HXMU050DA)
Samsung provided us with two drives for review: the 2.5” S2 with a 500 GB capacity, and its 1.8” little brother named the S1 (details on the next page). The HXMU050DA is Samsung’s current flagship model, but you can also get 320 GB, 250 GB, and 160 GB capacity units. All of these are based on a USB 2.0 interface and come in four different colors: black, brown, red, or white. Compared to other portable storage products, which are typically black or at least somewhat dark in shade, the S2 Portable provides styling that might be a better match for the fairer sex and style-crazed kids.
Samsung specified a weight of 170 g for the 500 GB model and 154 g for the 320 and 250 GB capacities, making this device one of the lightest 2.5” portable storage solutions at these capacities. The enclosure is made of plastic, but is attractive nonetheless. All Samsung S2 drives are based on the Spinpoint M hard drive series, which runs at 5,400 RPM, offers 8 MB of cache, and a Serial ATA/300 interface.
Useful Software
Samsung added two software tools to the S2 Portable drives: Auto Backup and Secret Zone. The first is a simple but efficient backup utility. It is preset to back up documents, but not multimedia files such as photos, videos, or music—these you must select manually. Backups can be password protected, and the utility supports versioning, scheduling, and compression.
The second program is called SecretZone, and it allows the user to create encrypted containers that can be mapped into Windows as individual drives. The tool isn’t as powerful and mature as TrueCrypt, but it is somewhat easier to handle. It also supports converting container files into executables, which may be decrypted on the fly without requiring the SecretZone utility.
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Nice article although 2.5" cases with e-sata and no external power supply (they use the USB for power) have been in the market for some time. I wouldn't consider a USB-only hand-held drive when for the same money i can get one of those. AC Ryan, ThermalTake and Akasa for example have such cases and you can pair them with practically any 2.5" 5400rpm drive (or in some cases an SSD drive).
Would love to see an article on these cases
I love my Freeagent Go drives. Just one thing. When they "wake up" from powersave my NAS can't find them anymore. So if you are having issues, first set the powersave to "never".
Nice article, but it's a fact the WD Elite offers a warranty period of 5 years in EMEA. This is a nice USP for this product. The other tested vendors aren't offering this if I'm not mistaken!
Sounds like Fujitsu actually bundled Acronis Disk Director with the drive instead of True Image. At lest, that's what it sounds like from the way the reviewer described it.
Personally, I wouldn't buy or recommend Seagate for anything. Reliability is non-existent. At one point, last year, I had 9 dead ones in the shop at one time. That 5 year warranty doesn't mean much when the replacement is the same junk. I recently returned 2 for warranty replacement. One of the warranty replacement drives was DOA. Nuff said.
I love my WD drive, but make sure you get a good cable (non retractable cable for sure). I was having issues using what I thought was a good cable (brand new, my guess maybe it was too long?) but it would not supply the WD with enough power to run the drive. Make sure to use the cable the came with the device, if you're having trouble powering it on, it may be the actual cable's fault.
One suggestion for your charts. A casual glance at the last chart page would lead one to believe the Seagate had the highest read throughput, yet it's scale is different than the other charts, topping out at 30MB/s. Normalize the scales so they are all the same, and then a casual glance delivers the difference in performance.
Does anyone have any experience with the My Passport Studio? I'd love to get one, but the reviews on New Egg are poor.
I think enthusiasts should consider building their own 3.5" external drive. Pick the enclosure and hard drive you like and combine them. Use TrueCrypt for encrypting if needed and you did already have a backup app, right?
I built one using a Vantec USB2/eSATA enclosure and a Fujitsu hard drive. Sorry, I don't have the part numbers here. Also got a PCMCIA (or whatever they are called these days) eSATA interface for my laptops. eSATA is sooo much nicer for external storage it *must* be considered by anyone who intends to move massive amounts of data. Because the enclosure still comes with USB capablity you retain backwards compatibility for when eSATA is not available. Since I used a 7200 RPM drive I do always need the USB power cord but it's worth the extra zip (pardon the pun).
I use this external drive for astronomical image processing which combines literally hundreds of 11MB files into a single image. Works great.
Personally, I wouldn't buy or recommend Seagate for anything. Reliability is non-existent. At one point, last year, I had 9 dead ones in the shop at one time. That 5 year warranty doesn't mean much when the replacement is the same junk. I recently returned 2 for warranty replacement. One of the warranty replacement drives was DOA. Nuff said.
I have a vastly different personal experience, I've had 2 Seagates for 4 years now, they've been running constantly, basically 24/7 since then. I bought a 7200.11, updated the firmware on that one, no problems, and now I have two 7200.12s in RAID0, I love them.
It's all personal experience, I don't think it matters what brand it is, it's the other variables that HDD makers can't do anything about that cause failures.
one thing about portable hard drive is, you drop it accidentally and you can say bye bye to it. thats why i no longer use a 2.5inch portable hard drive anymore, substitute it with a 16GB thumbdrive makes sense
. It was few times smaller than the 2.5inch drive and I can drop it anytime I want 
.
www.techmostwanted.com
I need an article just like this one right now...but on 2 Terrabyte backup options...comparing prices options and different connection types.
How many different computers were these tested on? I've owned and used several different portable drives, and used them on at least 3 desktop and 2 laptop computers. I think only one of the computers was able to operate the drive completely on the power from only one USB port. Most of the time I had to connect with a special cable to two USB ports.
I'm not sure of the benefits of ESATA, with a fast computer running USB 2.0 the data transfer rate seems plenty fast.
I use a rocketfish 2.5" esata enclosure I picked up at goodwill for 5 bucks. Plug it into the USB and ESATA so it has power/esata speed and not had a single problem in over six months using the drive daily.
Seagate FreeAgent Go does NOT back up music album art.
I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 250 GB today (20090628) after a WD Passport Essential 160 GB failed. First backup went fine, but when I looked at the log I found it does NOT backup any file with both system & hidden attributes on, which leaves all the music album art behind. Bummer, I'd have to refresh every album after a recovery, say a couple of months of work. I don't get it. That is a truly major oversight.
I'm having trouble sorting through info in various articles reviewing portable hard drives. I need a 500GB hard drive that has software that is pretty easy to use, that is super dependable, and that is not too fragile. I'm a basic computer user. I have a laptop from work and want to store my personal stuff. Just music, pics, and documents. Advice?
Hi. Am using free agent 500GB portable hard disk.I am having a problem in the file transfer.For accessing the stored files too it takes much time and it gets hanged often. Wats the solution for this? Should i have to go for the replacement as i have bought this before three months?
I like the Samsung 1.8" drive.
Small, sexy, and a decent amount of storage.
That, or a 64GB flash drive... hmm. (Smaller, not as sexy, more durable.)