Disclaimer: Apricorn
provided the review unit to the author for testing and review. Also
be aware that Apricorn has no input into the content of this, or any
other review.
Categories of accessories
are pretty well established these days now that computing is a mature
platform. When thinking of external storage that gets plugged into a
USB port, on the one hand we have the small flash drive. It is light
and portable, but limited by the capacity. On the other hand we have
an external hard drive. These devices offer high capacity, but the
trade off is increased weight, a larger size, and they are subject to
mechanical failure.
The Aegis Portable 3 fits in
neither category, and in fact straddles between these two categories.
It is an external drive, that fits into the 2.5" hard drive
category, but it is based on an SSD drive (other versions are
available with a mechanical hard drive). While it still has the size
of an external casing of a notebook hard drive, it gains the
advantages of first and foremost speed, and secondarily a lighter
weight, and a resilence to falls.
The drive comes with the
external drive itself, a case, a "Quick Start Guide," and a
cable to plug the drive into two USB ports for additional power in
the unlikely case that is needed. Similar to previous Apricorn
products, it has the USB plug and short cord integrated into the
device itself. The external drive is composed of silver and black
plastic, and has only a single green LED. It has no software
preloaded, but works as a USB mass storage device, which makes it
compatible with any modern OS, including Windows and Apple. The
drive is powered by the USB port.
For the record, all testing
was done on my Lenovo Ideapad S400 running Windows 8, while on AC
power. This notebook has both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports making it
ideal to look for any speed difference between the generation of USB
ports.
The drive that was sent for
testing was the 256 GB capacity. With formatting it had 238 GB of
usable space.
The drive speeds were tested
using HDTune 2.55. On the USB 2.0 port, the average speed was 29.1
MB/sec. Recall that the maximum speed the 2.0 standard was designed
for was 35 MB/sec, and the Aegis Portable 3 is pretty close to
saturating the maximum speed that the USB 2.0 can do. Next, the
drive was plugged into the USB 3.0 port. Now the drive came into its
own, and the average speed was 224.1 MB/sec. This was considerably
faster, and also impressive was that the CPU Utilization dropped by
half as well. By way of comparison, the last mechanical hard drive Itested in the USB 3.0 port ran at 88.6 MB/sec, and this flash drive
smoked it.
The drive is available in
the following varieties:
- Mechanical Hard Drive 500GB- $79
- Mechanical Hard Drive 1 TB- $109
- Mechanical Hard Drive 1.5 TB- $189
- Solid State Drive 256 GB- $399
- Solid State Drive 512 GB- $599
The Apricorn Aegis Portable
3 external drive is a good solution for portable backup on the go.
For those that have outgrown their USB thumb drive, it represents a
simple solution. For those with a newer computer that can take
advantage of the USB 3.0 speeds, the SSD is an option to consider,
although it does command a more premium price. For example, a
photographer looking to archive their memory cards on a frequent
basis, the SSD would make a lot of sense, however budget minded
consumers, or those with no USB 3.0 port should stick with the
mechanical hard drive based one. Then again, more speed, and a
little future proofing are never a bad thing.
Overall Grade: A
Jonas
No comments:
Post a Comment