Customer Reviews

SimpleTech PRO500Q Pro Drive 500 GB Quad Interface External Hard Drive (Grey)

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

 

 

I bought two of these.

One arrived with a defective power adaptor (it actually rattled when shaken). One quick call to Hitachi's tech support, and a new adaptor was on the way.

Otherwise, these seem fine. They're not as compact as my smaller/older Hitachi hard drive, but they're compatible with everything (FW, eSATA).

Plugged it in and it revved right up, no troubles. The only thing that does seem to happen occasionally--and it might not be the drive at all--is that it will fail to mount maybe one time a month. Switching the drive off and then back on solves that ill.

I was looking for a hard drive to use with my Mac mini as a backup drive and this works just fine using either USB or Firewire, and it even offers eSata in case I ever have need of that. It is not entirely noiseless, but it is tolerable. No problems setting up the drive.

When I got my drive, all of the cables were unnecessarily taped to the inside of the box with this really nasty tape. The tape left all sorts of nasty sticky tape residue after it was removed. After some really hard scrubbing and multiple cleaning products, it just won't come off. So now I'm left with a sticky power adapter and cables.
Otherwise, the drive looks nice and it pretty fast as long as you purchase a firewire 800 cable for it. It only comes with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 cables, and they're kind of short.
Even though I don't have an eSata port on my computer, it's nice that it also comes with that feature if I ever decide to use it.
Sometimes I have issues getting it to mount on my computer, and I'm not sure if it's my cable or the actual firewire 800 port on the drive or my computer. It seems to always mount fine using firewire 400.
Overall a very good hard drive, at a very cheap price.

The USB interface to my computer running Microsoft Windows XP Pro, SR2 worked well. However, the FireWire 400 interface has not. While I believe the problem is a Windows configuration issue, very little support in troubleshooting it could be found either in the drive documentation or on the product website. In fact, neither the Fast Start instructions nor the more detailed product guide had information to ensure proper Firewire connections. Nevertheless, other than being a bit slow, the drive works very well with the USB connection.

I've had this drive for a couple weeks. It works great. The quad interface is really handy, now I use firewire 400, which is really fast. In the future I plan to use eSATA, having the choice is great. Extremely quiet, cool when not in use, it gets hot when spinning but not overly hot. If I ever need some more space, I will definitely buy a SimpleTech PRO Quad.

Beautifully made, quiet, with all the output ports. But it won't work as a DVR storage extender with the Scientific Atlanta 8300 DVR which is what I bought it for.

Bought for my Scienticif Atlanta 8300HD DVR, but two different DVRs will not connect; both report device not communicating propoerly. Oh well... Will have to return.

Note: I rated three, trying to minimize my affect on the average. I have no idea if good or not, just won't work for my situation.