Thread: Verbatim 320GB Portable Hard Drive

Verbatim 320GB portable hard drive does catch the eye with its sharp looks. The matte finish of the exterior guards against fingerprints, though it is not quite the sleekest. It includes a standard USB cable to connect to PC/laptop, and a good software bundle. Internally, this product uses a Toshiba 2.5 inch hard disk which spins at 5400rpm, has an 8MB buffer and uses two platters.

The bundled Nero Back it up 2 Essentials is intuitive, and capable of letting users schedule their folder backups and protect files on the Verbatim drive by encrypting them with a password.

However, its data transfer speeds while being quite good, could have been better. In synthetic benchmarks, it gave a read speed average of 31 MB/s and write speed average of 27.1 MB/s. The read access time averaged 17.85 ms. On the PC Mark HOD test suite, this drive scored 2762 (about 300 points lower than most similar drives). Real-world write tests consisted of copying a number of small files (1.81 GB, 31 files of varying sizes), and one single large file (over 2 GB in size), from a fast desktop hard drive to the portable drive under testing. Speeds here averaged 22.7 MB/s and 26.5 MB/s respectively. Real-world read speed (copying multiple files from portable drive to desktop HOD) stood at 27 MB/s.

So its data transfer speed is average. Also, it might look slightly bulky compared to other slim-looking offerings on the market. What this drive gains with its low price, it fritters away with its low warranty period (Verbatim offers a two year warranty on this drive, as against 5 years by others).