Customer Reviews

Acomdata HD500UHE5-72 E5 HybridDrive 500 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

Installed in January.
Used Occasionally.
Dead by April
They want me to pay shipping back to them.
What more can I say.

Bought this external Acomdata 500GB hard drive recently. Windows starts giving me "delayed write failure" errors - not even the 2nd day I owned it. So I Google, find out that one cause of this is bad or loose cabling. I check the drive, and sure enough there is a ton of play on the cable - its loose enough that it can probably move on its own just from vibrations on my desk. I try another cable I had from another drive, and its loose too. The USB connector on the drive is not tight enough. Where is the quality control here? Am going to return it ASAP.

The big thing with these drives is supposedly they don't need fans to stay cool enough to keep the drive alive.

All I can say is the drive was always warm when I ran it.

Then one day it just never spun up. The blue light on front came on but the lack of any vibration and heat makes me fairly certain the drive is no longer spinning. Needless to say windows won't recognize it and so far there is no way to get data off it.

Seems to me the spin motor overheated and is now dead.

Customer service from Acomdata requires you to fill out large form and register and then you get message you will get an email within 3 days - great.

I guess I'll wait for them for suggestions before I open the thing and see if I can get the drive inside the box to spin by manually giving the hub a spin or find a heat circuit breaker to trip (PLEASE BE ONE).

Nothing to lose at this point I guess.

750 GB of data gone.
Next time I 'll get a drive with a fan.

Or if I do get one of these I'll just take the drive out of the case and put it in my desktop box where it will get some air and be a regular internal drive.

Oh, the other pain about this is they partition a piece of the drive as an un repartionable cd area where they store a bunch of software that they want you to install like firefox, google stuff ext. I already had them so it was annoying that this always popped up . It also takes up a drive letter for the cdrom partition as a cdrom.
And of course you lose a few hundred megs of space to this annoying extra partition.

I bought the 750GB version of this drive and it worked OK for a several months (but less than a year) as a backup drive. However, I discovered that the encryption unlocking software didn't work after upgrading my Mac to OS X 10.5 Leopard. No biggie: I just disabled the password protection while one of my computers was booted under 10.4 Tiger. I have visited the Acomdata website on numerous occasions and have never seen an update to address this issue. I also threw the Acomdata enclosure in the trash.

About a week ago, the drive stopped communicating. System Profiler only recognized the drive as a USB device if I put pressure on the connector into the drive a certain way. I opened the case, reseated the connector to the hard drive, and tried powering it up. The hard drive was making some very weak noises, so I thought that the drive itself was dead.

Not willing to give up a 750 GB drive without a fight, I went down to a local electronics place and found an inexpensive ($10) SATA hard drive enclosure. I installed the hard drive in it and, lo and behold, it was recognized but the Mac couldn't find a filesystem, which means I lost all my backup data. At least at that point I knew that the problem was with the USB interface electronics in the enclosure. I reformatted and made new backups of everything. I also threw the Acomdata enclosure in the trash.

I'm guessing that the formatting problem is due to the need to encrypt the data on the drive even though password protection was disabled. This would allow it to be re-enabled without having to re-encrypt the data. It also means that the drive would likely be unreadable in any enclosure but the one it came in.

Therefore, my advice would be to avoid this drive or any other drive that supports encryption.

I literally had this drive replaced 4 times and each one died within a year. the fourth time around i never even bothered to plug it in because i knew if i used it all my data would get lost again.

So after a few months of sitting in the box i broke it out to use it for a $2,000 video editing job im working on. I figured it would last at least two months or so to complete the project. I was wrong - this thing just died on me for the fourth time - Ive NEVER written a review on amazon, but this is literally the most unstable, unusable, unreliable external drive you can buy on the market. DO NOT BUY THIS IF YOU VALUE YOUR DATA - this has cost me my thesis project the first time it died, 350 gb of movies the second time it died, countless hours of troubleshooting and data recovery attempts (all unsuccessful,) and now is costing me a little over $2000 dollars and about 36 hours of time archiving and clipping 12 hours of footage.

Is this in order for some kind of class action lawsuit or something? This drive is really really horrible. I'm not even sending it back for a replacement - I would really rather let someone kick me in the nads before I attempt to use another acomdata product. Thanks to them I do not trust any external storage devices at all anymore.

I have both the 500 gig and the 160 gigabyte versions of this product. One day about six months after installing the 160 gigabyte the drive no longer showed in my computer.
I had already brought the 500 gigabyte and everything seemed to be going fine. Then I got a Microsoft error indicating the device was not working.
Of course I wrote to the Acomdata service e-mail address. It's very sophisicated. You can send them an e-mail from their whooppee dooppee web site and they do not acknowledge your communication, there is no way to evidence that you sent them an e-mail. I found an address in California but I don't think they are there anymore.


Deciding I was not getting co-operation from Acomdata I bought a sata/ide to usb 2.0 adapter by Vantec. It is an excellent product. All my old drives which I had kept from obsolete computers could be recognized using this product.

ACOMDATA drives were not recognized. These drives come with two partitions on them. The hybrid partition on each product was not listed when I did a device manager volume check. The "empty" partitions (non-hybrid) 145/465 on each device were listed in the volume check but without a letter. So I cannot get into them. The hybrid partitions did not show at all.

I haighly recommend the Vantec adapter for recovering data from old drives.

I DISCOURAGE PURCHASE OF ACOMADATA PRODUCTS. The reason is simple. They don't support their NON-DURABLE products. [...]

I bought mine some 6 months ago. Followed the instructions and works great with my computer (2005 Apple Powerbook G4, MacOS X 10.4). It handles my photo vault, iTunes library, video library and most of my documents. I'm a happy customer :-)

Update: My unit died right after the warranty expired. I would expect at least three years of service from a hard drive, not just one. In any case, when it worked it did great, but the reliability is now in doubt. Not a happy customer anymore :-(

I bought the little brother of this one, the HD250UHE5-72. It died in under nine months... Its demise began with a steady "click click click" as the head kept parking itself. About a month later, I was able to cajole it into working one more time and removed my data before the motor quit. This has a Samsung PATA drive at its heart. I would never buy anything from Acomdata again.

I had (yes, had) everything on this drive. Today it died. Apparently, this is quite common. The loss is so drastic, I can't even put my mind around it. You get what you pay for...

This thing really is a piece of garbage. I used it to back up data on my multiple macs.
First, there were some times that the drive didn't mount properly.
Then, one day... it wouldn't mount at all. Get a La Cie instead. I had a 160 gb drive for over 6 years. No trouble what-so-ever.

I wrote to AcomData's tech forum. No replies... It's been 3 weeks.