Cheap, counterfeit hard drives have proliferated across the internet, with many customers falling victim, even on legitimate platforms like Amazon. We’ve seen this in action, such as an external drive claiming to have an NVMe SSD inside but actually containing only microSD cards. Even prominent brands like Seagate have been affected by scandals due to unofficial sellers selling used drives as new. Because of this, data recovery firm Secure Data Recovery has been testing affordable drives, says Ars Technica, and it came across a surprisingly affordable but legitimate item.
The UnionSine DataPocket 500GB 2.5-inch slim portable external hard drive is the item in question, which was priced at $28.28 on Amazon at the time of writing (although its regular price is $33.27). It’s also available in other sizes, which are similarly priced attractively — 250GB for $25.49, 320GB for $22.94, 750GB for $39.89, 1TB for $47.38, and 2TB for $69.47. This puts its per GB dollar cost at about $0.03 to $0.10, unheard of pricing at these relatively small capacities. By comparison, Western Digital’s My Passport costs $65.54 for the 1TB drive and $82.99 for the 2TB one — about 16% to 28% more than the competition.
When Secure Data Recovery tested the drive, the team was surprised to find that its read and write speeds worked as advertised. The Amazon page says that the UnionSine drive has a theoretical read speed of 110 MB/s to 133 MB/s and a write speed as high as 103 MB/s, and CrystalDiskInfo returned similar numbers. Inside the enclosure was a Toshiba MQ01ABD050V hard drive from 2016, meaning it was hosting a nine-year-old storage drive.
There’s no proof that the drive was refurbished or brand new, especially as the company said that the drive’s power-on hours information can be reset. But given that it’s nearly a decade old, we cannot be sure how much longer it will last. There’s an anecdotal report of a UnionSine external drive failing on Reddit, with the drive using a Western Digital one. Therefore, it is possible that the company is purchasing old and used drives, refurbishing them, and then selling them on Amazon and other platforms as external storage devices.
Despite those reports, one could say that you’re getting a good value for the UnionSine hard drive, especially as it works as expected. It’s probably an okay buy if you need something cheap and quick. But given the alleged age of the drives used in them, they’re best avoided if you want a drive for long-term storage and archival purposes.
If you’re looking for something reliable, you can check out our best hard drives list for internal use, or our best external SSDs if you want something to bring with you. And if you want to save a buck, you should keep an eye out for the best SSD and hard drive deals.
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