Hitachi SimpleTough 500GB

Full Review

This external hard disk drive looks like it has doffed army fatigues and turned out for war in a world that demands ruggedness and durability. The Hitachi SimpleTough 500GB uses a 2.5-inch laptop hard disk internally, and connects to your computer over a USB 2.0 cable. While such a cable is usually detachable, it is integrated into the drive’s body in this case and though it is still flexible, it is shorter than usual. This cable, the “ruggedized” body and the software it comes with are what differentiate this 500GB external HDD from the competition.

The USB cable is quite short and can be tucked into its own compartment when you are on the go.

One look at it and you know why Hitachi chose to brand it the SimpleTough series. Its exterior is ergonomic with rubberized sides and is stylish, even though it is a bit thicker and wider than offerings from other brands. Presumably, this is to make it more capable of surviving a fall or two (from a reasonably low height). An LED indicator is present at the top.

The USB cable is quite short and can be tucked into its own compartment when you are on the go. And that happens to be the Achilles Heel of this product – the cable is not a separate element that you can interchange but is built-in which ensures you cannot “forget” to take the cable along and is good as long as everything is still working. But the place where this cable connects into the drive’s internal USB controller is quite delicate and leads to problems of placing the drive, whenever you are connecting it to a USB port that is not accessible and out in the open. In other words, plugging it into a laptop, DVD/media player and open-rig desktop setup does work. Plugging it into a desktop PC’s crowded back-panel, front-USB, or using anything less than the best USB extender cables cause problems, due to less power being supplied or due to insufficient space. When the drive is connected, if the USB cable is strained or twisted in any way, the connection to the PC becomes intermittent or lost. The “integrated” USB cable could almost be called a USB patch because of its shortness, and is the root cause of the above troubles.

Software is provided for backup functionality, in the form of “Hitachi Local Backup” that can automate backups of your computer’s files onto the drive, and “Hitachi Ultimate Backup” that provides 2 GB of free online storage to take secure, online backups that are accessible from anywhere. Also bundled is “Joggle”, a digital content manager for easy tracking, sharing and publishing of photos, music, and video.

It is formatted with the FAT32 file system by default, meaning all OSes (Windows, Linux and Mac) have full access to it right from the beginning. However the file-size limitation of this file system might make you want to first format it to the default one supported by your OS – NTFS for Windows, EXT3 for Linux, and HFS+ for Mac. As with any drive of its capacity, this one offers 465.8 GB of usable storage space once the disk is formatted.

For those interested in the internals, this portable external drive uses a Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B (2.5 inch form-factor laptop HDD) spinning at 5400RPM with an 8MB buffer, and two platters constituting the hard drive. Though this is a SATA-II hard disk, the casing, USB adaptor chip and the speed of the USB 2.0 interface are the bottlenecks. It performs about as well as any other USB 2.0 hard disk in the synthetic benchmarks and real-world tests, and there isn’t much that is different on that front. It did not get warm to the touch during intense testing. To view these details in an easier table-format, take a look at the “Performance” tab of this review.

This product is available only in the one colour we saw, which should not be much of an issue considering it is not priced for the mainstream, and those who do want a drive like this might be glad about its sombre colouring yet stylish design. At such a niche then, where it is priced on par with the more expensive eSATA/USB 3.0 drives because of its “Tough” positioning, the only sticking part is the USB cable. Hitachi offers a three year warranty on this drive.

Bottom Line

An external USB 2.0 hard drive designed to look good, which is capable of surviving a fall or two as well. But it is still limited by the speed of the USB 2.0 interface and those who don’t need the ruggedness of the Hitachi SimpleTough 500GB should re-evaluate their options in light of its price.
A drive with a larger storage capacity at a lower price is the Seagate FreeAgent Go 640GB.