This year, give your loved one a little space. Storage space, that is. Christmas is just around the corner, and there’s no better gift for that nerd in your family than external storage for all those downloaded episodes of Heroes that are cluttering up precious hard drive space. Verbatim has once again outdone themselves on space and simple coolness with the InSight Portable Hard Drive. This sleek piece of blackness comes in sizes of 350GB as well as 500GB and features Always On display technology. I’ll get into that in a few minutes, but right now let’s get a better look at the HDD itself and what it brings to the storage table.
For a portable hard drive that continuously displays available free space, take a peek at the Verbatim InSight hard drive with an Always On LCD that shows the drive’s available free space and personalized name. The Always On LCD display automatically updates when the drive is connected and/or safely dismounted and is easily renamed right from your PC or MAC. Compatible with all USB connections, the InSight™ drive includes a USB 2.0 cable, a Quick Start guide and Nero BackItUp software that offer full system backup/restore functions and optional password security. Compact but big on storage capacity, the InSight™ drive is available in a sleek piano-black finish with capacities of 320GB and 500GB and carries a 5-year limited warranty. With an Always On display, the Verbatim InSight™ hard drive is a plug-and-play external drive that keeps you in the know – even when it’s disconnected.
- Sleek piano-black finish adds style and elegance to your PC accessories
- Features an Always On LCD that display’s a personalized drive name and available free space.
- View the Always On LCD display without power
- Identify drive and free space without connecting to a PC
- Includes Nero BackItUp software*
- 5-year limited warranty
- Package Includes: InSight™ Hard Drive, USB 2.0 cable, Quick Start Guide
Specs:
- Rotational Speed – 5400 RPM
- Display – 32 x 128 pixels “always on” cholesteric display
- External Power – USB bus-powered
- Interface – One USB mini-B port
- Data Transfer Rate – USB 2.0 High-Speed: 480 Mb/s (max), USB 1.1 Full Speed: 12 Mb/s (max)
- Unit Dimensions – 5.99 in. X 3.37 in. X 0.63 in. (151.12 mm x 85.51 mm x 16.0 mm)
- Unit Weight – 0.36 lb (161.59 g)
System Requirements:
- USB 1.1 or 2.0 Port
- Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7
- Mac OS X 10.1 or higher
On the next page we crack open the box and test it out…
I was excited when I got word that I would be reviewing the new InSight 500GB. I am usually impressed with Verbatim’s goods and was sure that this would be no exception. But when I opened the box and found this little chunk of plastic not much bigger than an iPhone, I was a little taken aback. I mean, this freakin’ thing is teeny. I know we can now fit 60+ GB of space on a flash drive, but this is a 500GB portable.
Opening the box, I found the drive itself nestled inside a soft cushion envelope. Underneath it was the instruction booklet and at the top under a fold of cardboard was the USB 2.0 cable that was promised on the box. Taking the InSight out of the cushion envelope I found the piano black top was covered with a plastic sheet to protect the shiny surface. After I had everything out of the box, I hooked the InSight up to my PC to test it out. No power cables needed, which I like. My power strip is full enough as it is. As soon as I connected the portable to my USB it proceeded to scan itself and read the name that had been given to it “Verbatim” as well as the amount of free space it had on hand, which was 465GB. Windows 7 installed the drivers and proceeded to display the options for the drive.
To start out, I had a folder full of random files sitting on my desktop that was just begging to be moved somewhere, anywhere, else. The total size of the folder was 35.5GB, and contained approximately 774 files. This is just a rough test; I’ll see what other speeds I can get out of it with software tests. It took exactly 25 minutes for a full transfer of the entire folder’s contents. That’s an average of 21.6 MBs per second. Not too bad. But that means that it would take you around four hours to back up a 320GB HDD via drag n’ drop. That’s a long time for a data transfer. But who backs up an entire HDD to a portable device anyway? You only want what’s important. That’s where the included Nero BackItUp software comes in. I’ll test that out soon, but first I want to do some speed tests on the InSight using HDTach and SiSoftware Sandra.
After messing around with HDTach and then realizing that it wasn’t compatible with Windows 7, I got it configured to run in XP compatibility mode and proceeded to test the InSight with an 8MB Short Bench test and a 32MB Long Bench test. I’d like to say there was difference between the two, but they both showed an average speed of 31.0 MB/s with 7% Utilization of my 3.2Ghz single-core CPU. HDTach isn’t the most taxing or thorough software with which to test this little toy, so I then move on to SiSoftware Sandra. Sandra knows what’s up when it comes to benchmarking. And bench pressing. She can easily handle 350 pounds with steroid-laced muscle to spare.
Sandra compared the read/write speed of the InSight 500GB to four other portable drives on the market. The InSight came in third with 2927 ops/sec, with number one being the OCZ Rally2 4GB (read our review here), and second being the Sandisk U3 Contour 4GB. The Kingston Mini-SD 1GB came in fourth, followed lousily by the ATP ToughDrive 4GB. The ATP 4GB also happens to be the very flash drive I use for my Windows ReadyBoost. It appears I could have chosen a better drive had I really put some thought into it.
So now that all the benchmarking is over, we can check out the Nero BackItUp software that Verbatim included on the drive itself. The program is sitting at the root of the HDD in a folder named Nero, obviously. If you have trouble finding this, you should probably not be messing with anything more advanced than an egg timer anyway. I installed the software and proceeded to select the files that I wanted backed up. I put the dual layer disc with my Warcraft installation files, just over 6GB of files there, and created a file on the InSight named BackItUp. I found naming files specifically helps to avoid confusion later. Especially since I plan on deleting this backup as soon as this review is over. So after selecting my files for backup and then selecting the destination, I hit the Finish button and let Nero do its thing. It took just over an hour for full compression and backup of all my files on the Warcraft disc. It took about 12 minutes for a full backup with no compression.
On the next page… the conclusion!
There are a few things to note when considering this drive. For one, the display only shows the drive name and free space available. Also, the LCD is not backlit, even though the product photos make it appear as such. The curved shape also does not lend this drive to being stackable, either.
The free space statistic is not real-time: it shows the amount of space when you first connect the device (thus powering it on). The other major caveat I ran into was that the drive is formatted in FAT32… meaning that I could not copy over large 6GB DVD images. This was easily rectified by reformatting the drive to NTFS but by this time I had already copied over hundreds of gigabytes.
In the end, this portable is a pretty awesome little drive. The ability to monitor the amount of space you have on it regardless of it being plugged in or not is a great addition. This should be mandatory for all enclosures from now on, I think. The speed isn’t nearly as good as a Firewire or eSATA, but it’s nothing to complain about either, especially if you are unlucky enough to recall backing up to USB 1.1. The piano black is always a welcome feature, and it really accents the simplicity of the design. It’s small, no buttons, with a single blue LED and a small LCD. The only port available is a single mini-USB and that pretty much sums up the outside. The inside, however, tells a different story. A small circuit board controlling the LCD and a 500GB Western Digital laptop HDD hold the power to store massive amounts of data in a small, sleek enclosure. In short… I like it.
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