ADATA DashDrive Elite HE720 Review

I have to say that this drive has really impressed me. I love the 9H stainless steel shell that encompasses the 500GB Seagate hard drive even it does happen be a fingerprint magnet. The slim build and single short cable means that it will easily slip into a jacket pocket or bag when moving from place to place. Also as mentioned before, the drive is surprisingly light considering its a hard drive inside with a steel casing. Heavy drives are not the most favoured item to keep in your pocket whilst on the go, so this is a welcomed change.

It would have been nice to see a slim case of some sort included in the package to further protect the drive when not being used, mainly to deter those pesky finger prints which is a side effect of the material choice of the case, but pickers can’t be choosers after all.

On a performance front, the inclusion of USB3.0 is a well welcomed sight considering a large number of drives still comes with USB2.0. This naturally means that a higher level of performance is there to be tapped into and the HE720 doesn’t fail to deliver at this point with a consistent read speed of over 100MB/s. We do see through the results a large fluctuation in the write speed and this does come down to file sizes. We did run a separate test to see what sort of real world write speed we would get with a 2GB file, with a peak write speed of 101MB/s found.

Whilst flash drives are the way forward as we know due to their notably higher read and write speeds, they do suffer from the same problems on the cost front as solid state drives do and paying near the £1/GB mark for a flash drive in my eyes is crazy. If you’re after more than 64GB of removable storage then it is a bit of a no brainer that a hard drive is the way to go and retailing at around the £70 mark, the 500GB HE720 has a lot to offer along with its business class looks.

Bottom line, if you’re after a compact external drive that can withstand the battles of day-to-day use and still look brand new at the end of it, the DashDrive Elite easily gets my favoured choice, especially for the price.

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