Clickfree Automatic Backup 160GB

Full Review

With a good-looking external hard disk and software bundle to ensure your important data is protected, what could go wrong for this portable drive? Read on to find out. The drive casing has two blue LED indicators on its body to show power and disk activity respectively. Drive performance was as good as any USB drive we have seen so far. The bundled Clickfree Automatic Backup software was easy to use, and is claimed to be a primary differentiator for this product versus other external drives. This drive brand is not widely available though.

The sides have a nice metallic feel, with the micro-USB and optional power input cables connecting to one side. This power input slot need only be used if your USB port can’t feed enough power and you don't have a second USB port free. The Y-cable provided for data transfer is usually sufficient, and the extra USB connector for power comes with a cap as a reminder that it doesn't need to be connected if you have enough power coming through the main USB cable. Internally, it uses a 2.5-inch Fujitsu 160GB hard disk with an 8MB buffer and spins at 5400RPM.

It would have been nice if there was a button on the drive, for quickly starting backups at the press of a button. Still, the software that comes with the drive more than makes up for that. Upon connecting to a Windows-based desktop/laptop, the software (ClickFree Automatic Backup 3.8) loads up as a 46.3 MB virtual optical drive. Without requiring any installation, it starts up automatically and backs up files and folders that you specify. The first time it runs, it configures itself for the PC it is connected to (yes, you can configure it to backup files on multiple computers). Initially, it searches through your entire hard disk for files to backup. If that is annoying, you can cancel at this point and then choose the files and folders to backup. After this, backup is as easy as you’d expect, with restoring data to the same location being just as easy. To get a feel of how it looks, see the images to the left of this review for some screenshots. The software is indeed very usable, and has something to offer for novices as well as advanced users. Similar software bundles from other external hard drive manufacturers often stumble at the ease-of-use factor.

Due to limitations of the USB 2.0 ports used today, the performance of external hard disks is at par in real-world tasks with maximum speeds hovering around 30 MB/s. Read speeds for file-transfer stood at 28.7 MB/s for a single large file and 25.48 MB/s for a number of small files. Write speed for a single large file was 25.83 MB/s and multiple small files were written at a lower speed of 20.7 MB/s as expected. Random access times for read and write stood at 17.4 ms and 8.82 ms respectively, with negligible CPU usage.

This 160GB drive from SAC carries a warranty of two years, and is priced at Rs. 5,025. Unfortunately, this is a price range where other brands offer a capacity of 500GB which is more than thrice the capacity of this one. Even if the software bundle offered by the others is not as easy-to-use, a user can still download free software to get as much functionality. As such, the pricing perhaps needs a re-thinking, since the software can’t easily be explained away as the reason for half of the cost. Those who need Clickfree Automatic Backup drives with higher capacity can purchase the portable 250GB version (Rs. 5,990), 320GB (Rs. 6,975), 500GB (Rs. 8,490), or a 1TB 3.5-inch version (Rs. 9,910).

Bottom Line

A decent portable drive for those who want to easily backup important files from multiple computers. It looks professional, has software that even novices can easily figure out, and performs as good as any portable USB drive can. The deal-breaker is the price.