SimpleTech wants to enchant potential customers with storage products that were designed by Pininfarina. The name stands for Battista Farina, who designed cars for popular French and Italian brands such as Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Peugeot, as well as Jaguar. In recent years, Pininfarina also created designs for IT hardware products, such as the SimpleDrive portable.
Like the Maxtor product, this drive resembles its larger brother, the SimpleDrive External 1 TB. The blue circle on the top of the drive looks like the capacity gauge of the SimpleDrive 1 TB, which lights up clockwise in pieces to illustrate the amount of storage capacity that has already been used. However, SimpleTech hasn't implemented this feature on the Portable version, which we believe would have been very helpful, as you typically grab your portable drive when leaving for a trip. In such a case it's nice to have an overview on available capacity.
SimpleTech currently offers four different capacities: 120, 160, 250 and 320 GB - clearly much more than Maxtor and Seagate. The box includes the software CD (which vibrates heavily in low-cost optical drives due to its angled shape), the data cable and the drive. The cable includes a second USB connector to ensure proper power supply. Customers get a three-year warranty. It would have been nice to get some sort of bag or protective cover for the drive.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
After 6 hours of "copying" the contents of my C drive using the Safety feature - which indicated that it had copied 260+MB successfully, nothing was written to the drive. This is worse than useless because if I had not checked to see how much space was still available I would not have realized I had no backup to recover from. Seagate Technical support confirmed my observations. Drive was fine, software was useless.
