Customer Reviews

SimpleTech by Hitachi SimpleDrive 500 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive SP-U35/500 (designed by Pininfarina)

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(60)

 

 

A while back I got a great deal on this 500GB hard drive (not at Amazon). The drive is very sleek and comes in cool colors. I have the black unit and matches in well with the rest of my PC and A/V components. I use this drive as an external archiving device for my Dish Network (DN) ViP622 HD receiver. Recently, DN has enabled this feature on their ViPs. I was coming close to filling up the DVR and this simple and painless upgrade has been awesome. The receiver detected the SimpleTech with ease, formated the drive in 2 minutes, and from that point on I have about 490 GB worth of extra DVR space. Playing archived video either in SD or HD format is no different vs. playing direct from the receiver. Outstanding quality/no complaints! This drive comes in 750GB and 1TB capacities and should be a worthy upgrade for PC/Mac backup as well. FYI, There is another variation of this unit with also a FireWire port.

This little baby was DOA right out of the box. Well, not exactly DOA, but severely wounded. Installation was a snap - just plugged in the power and USB cords and turned it on. Little blue light came on and circled round a few times indicating plenty of disk space. So far so good! Installed the ArcSoft backup software and did a trial run on ~6GB photos. Backup went OK. Got brave and went to back up ~8GB datafiles ... the back up started but then went on and on and on and on and on and on (get the picture?). Finally, a UNABLE TO WRITE DATA - HARDWARE FAILURE message popped up. Power cycled the drive, checked the connections and tried again. No luck. Ran SureDelete File to delete the datafiles that did make it to the drive, but encountered the same hardware failure error. Was able to reformat the drive and clean it with SureDelete Disk. Got brave again and tried to copy a set of data to the Simpletech ... big mistake. Got the hardware failure error again. Reformat / Disk Clean / Reformat / Disk Clean then packed it up and returned it to Costco. These things seem to be hit or miss - it works or it doesn't. Mine didn't.

I needed an external hard drive as my pathetic 80 gig hard drive I'd been using for the past 3 years was bursting at it's seams. So After looking around I saw this model on sale at Best Buy for $95.99, couldn't go wrong there, since it was 320 GIGS, it was a steel. Racing home, I pulled it out of the box, and lets get some things out of the way right now:

1. It has an on/off switch (yeah!)

2. The USB cable is really short. (About 2-3 feet)

3. It has a separate plug for the power supply. (Less drain on your USB).

After straining with the short USB cord, I found a good setup on my desktop. Plugged it into the USB port, and plugged the power cord into the wall. Turned it on, and BAM! 320 Gigs added to the computer. No hassle. It is quiet, and very fast.

I've only run into one small nuisance, it occasionally goes into sleep mode when not being used, and it takes about 6 seconds to start working again when waking up, so lets say it goes to sleep, and then you go to your computer, click on an mp3 file, you must wait for it to start up again before the file will play. But this only happens rarely.

The light on the top spins clockwise whenever you are loading something off the hard drive, this looks cool, but may be an annoyance to those who don't like giant spinning lights.

Overall, this is an excellent, dependable, fast hard drive, and by the way, it looks freakin awesome.

I've had this drive for several months, and it seemed to work fine. Then, I was unable to retrieve some family photos from it. System would lock up on read errors. So I offloaded all I could and tried a format of the drive. Failed 7 times. No diagnostic software provided by manufacturer. It's as if they are relying on other drive manufacturers to provide it. Only a basic user guide is provided on their 'support' CD. Poor support.

After downloading and running Seagate's Seatools, the long generic test FAILED. Why couldn't Simpletech have such a BASIC tool.

I would NOT recommend buying this drive under ANY circumstance. Poor initial quality if it won't even format. I do not even want to send it back for fear they'd send me another. Dependability is of the utmost on USB hard drives. Simlpletech is not reliable for me.

In our project where we were backing up over 1,100 laptops, I would say 35% of the drives sent out are dead on arrival. All of the drives are brand new, and shrink wrapped. It was mainly the power issue. This was a major set back to our project. As we would have to reschedule the users and the technician we've sent out.

I went through three of these in four months. I returned the ones that died on me for a new one hopeing it would work again. I had a TEAC back in 2003 that lasted me 3 years before it died. These dont even last a month. I suggest you do not buy this hard drive.

I am would say I'm very tech savvy having much of the latest tech and building my own Home Theater Pc. I have seen many hard drives in my time and used perhaps all of the hard drive manufacturers (From old 4 GB drives to 1 TB drives). Not one has failed until this drive. I was lured by the cost of the drive and wanted to backup my media onto this drive to clear space on other drives. But no less than 3 weeks after converting nearly 300 GB's of data on the drive, there was catastrophic failure. I lost all the media I was converting. Nearly $300 worth of itunes media and countless hours of video conversion data for my apple tv was lost because the manufacturing of this "sleek" designer hard drive.

Take my review with a grain of salt being that I lost a ton of data. However, the hard drive failure has been due to mechanical error. Also, customer support has been very lack luster and now 2 weeks after sending my hard drive for replacement, I have yet to receive an email or call regarding the status. For all I know the company has reconditioned my drive and will send it out again. There has been no follow up and return procedures are sketchy at best.

This is a small sleek and roomy external hard drive. If you are like most people these days, you have so many programs and so little room left on your computer's hard drive after installation especially if you have a large Itunes library like myself. It makes the whole computer sluggish. An external hard drive is a must have in order to backup important files and to keep your computer running at a quicker pace. Simple tech offers a sleek and light hard drive with a 320 GB capacity that can meet all your needs. It is not noisy and is easy to install and use. In another review, they stated that there were no instructions. Actually, there are instructions which are on the enclosed disk and can be opened with Adobe Reader. The setup software is preloaded on the hard drive and all you have to do is go to "computer" on your computer's menu and click on the external drive and bring up the setup menu. Once it is setup and the computer restarted, the program can be accessed their the program menu. I looked around and compared brands and prices and this was an excellent bargain for the amount of its storage capacity.

I ordered the 320 gb drive and received a defective piece of hardware.

I asked for a replacement and received a second one that did not work

either ... I called the manufacturer ... no one answered their phones.

I called twice and both times waited 20 minutes. Finally I e-mailed their

Support group, after several e-mails back and forth they determined that

the second unit was defective and I should return it.

How can you store your (precious) data on a storage medium that is poorly

manufactured. I can understand one defective device, but two is really a

bad sign.

I needed a storage device for my computer so I began to look for a new external hard drive. I saw this 500GB drive at a good price and it did look rather funky so I leapt at this model - big mistake!

I immediately had problems with this drive as my Windows XP couldn't find it to begin with. I spent time and managed to get it to work however as other people have said it would stop working. I tried to contact the customer service department and I never received any e-mail from them. I persevered with the drive and I eventually figured out that there was a heat issue with the drive. The customer service department never got back to me or simply ignored my e-mails - another common complaint by other people.

My advice is not to get this drive as it appears that other users have problems with it. I would suggest that you don't get fooled by looks or the price and spend a little extra. I ended up replacing the drive with a 500GB HP model and it's worked beautifully.