ADATA SH14 portable USB 3.0 HDD review

Final words and conclusion

USB 3.0 storage is getting more and more popular. FLASH based units are often expensive, especially once you pass 32GB storage sizes. That's where traditional storage like the HDD comes into play.

Admittedly I was pleasantly surprised by the overall performance.  If you are in Windows 7, please do format the unit to NTSF as it's FAT32 formatted (for compatibility). Once formatted you'll be able to use it for huge files and see read performance of 100MB/sec over that USB 3.0 bus and for portable storage that's just nice and groovy.

Write performance remains a little icky, if you have massive amounts of MP3 files to move the performance will crash to a very slow 10 MB/sec. If you like to transfer massive movie files and ISO and such, then write performance easily impresses at 100 MB/sec again.  So keep that in mind, the bottleneck is write performance with smaller files.

You do gain a product that is 750GB, USB 3.0, portable, rugged, can survive a kick, can survive a glass of water and does not need an external power source. All that for roughly 75 EUR is a pretty okay deal really.

As stated write performance will be limited when you are dealing with lots and lots of small files. But is that the actual intended sage for a external storage disk? You surely are not using it say as an SSD. So we don't think so.

 Remember,  if you can’t find a USB 3.0 port, it will work just fine at USB 2.0 speeds but you'll boggle down towards low USB 2.0 speed (32Mb/sec). As stated the capacities include 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB. Oh and we forgot to mention it but the SH14 ships with some interesting software installed. The drive has OStoGO tool that will convert the Windows 7 DVD to a digital format so the user can install Windows on a computer and boot from the USB HDD. The SH14 also comes with a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security.

Anyway let's wrap it up, the SH14 is an interesting storage device alright. Nothing about it is complicated, pop it into a USB 3.0 host and you are good to go. Though not perfect in terms of small file write performance it definitely beats any USB 2.0 storage solution out there. At 75 EUR for the 750GB version, we can definitely recommend it.

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