ADATA SH14 portable USB 3.0 HDD review - Introduction

USB 3.0 gear, gadgets and storage units are slowly penetrating the market, problem remains though that big USB flash drives like 64GB and 128GB are repulsively expensive. What if you need a little more space to transfer a huge volume of files fast, yet need it to be portable ?

Well hey now, I've found a pretty interesting device that actually is affordable pumping lots of data over that over USB 3.0 port.

USB 2.0 portable HDDs as such work decent, but face it... they are darn slow for lots of files or big files. Yep file transfers takes ages. As such I was happy as a puppy when USB 3.0 arrived, but we all surely had to wait a while before real viable USB 3.0 disk storage units arrived at the scene.

It's Autumn 2011, slowly but steadily the market is seeing end-user USB 3.0 portable disks that are easy to carry around and offer very decent read/write speeds. Today's tested product comes in hellish red or dark black and in 500GB, 750GB or 1TB capacities, which willl set you back €60, €75 or €95, respectively.

As such it's time to review another USB 3.0 storage unit. It's originates from ADATA and is called the Superior (not a pun) SH14. We test the 750GB version of this model which should bring us read performance of 90 MB/sec.

Copying movies, media, heck ISO files onto this stick is plenty fast enough ... heck it even wants more as copying your data on and from this unit is fast, very fast compared to the USB 2.0 standards we all got accustomed to.

Obviously to use USB 3.0 storage, your motherboards needs a proper functioning USB 3.0 port (USB 3.0 host), after that you're good to go really. And if not, sorry my man, but rest assured the device will fallback to USB 2.0 so ya can still use it.

Anyway, let's have a peek at the product, ADATA's latest looks quite fashionable. Buried under red is a 2.5-inch, 5400RPM drive that's IPX4 water-resistant and "military grade shockproof."

We opted the hellish red version, check 'r out.