# ADATA DashDrive HE 720 USB 3.0 Portable hard disk



## sumonpathak (Mar 27, 2013)

Howdy folks! hows it going out there?
Today for you guys i have something from ADATA.
Something from their range of portable HDD's.

but first a few words about the company


> *ADATA Technology Co., Ltd.* is a Taiwanese memory and storage manufacturer, founded in May 2001 by Simon Chen.Its main product line consists of DRAM modules, USB drives, USBhard drives and memory cards in CompactFlash and Secure digital formats. ADATA has also explored other markets, such as digital frames, solid-state drives, and Express Cards.


Now that's out-of-the-way,lets see what we have in our hands today.
Presenting the Adata DashDrive HE 720


Main feature

8.9mm Slimmest Profile
Stainless Steel Enclosure with 9H Scratch Resistance
One-Touch Backup Button Allowing Easy Backup Process,
SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (backward compatible with USB 2.0)
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/Adata_cover.jpg

first,some photo's

First up the box,

nothing much to write,let the pictures do the work.
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_boxfront.jpg
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_boxback.jpg
The front and the back lists out important features about the product so that one can get a grip on what exactly he is purchasing.

Box Contents
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_packege1.jpg

Nothing much to say the package comes with the HDD and a USB3.0 Cable.Although its a bit short.

Now to the main star of the show..the drive itself...

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_body1.jpg
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_body2.jpg
Up close and personal the drive looks very in my opinion.
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_back.jpg
the back has four tiny bumps to act as stands..its about 1MM in height.The bumps helps it to not get scratches.Although i doubt such a nice looking drive will get man handled enough to get scratches.

A few more pics of this beauty and am gonna close this chapter.

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_cable1.jpg
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_cable2.jpg
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_ports.jpg
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/s/he720_angularshot.jpg

So that's take care of the photo shoot..am sure u guys like it by now as i am..but lets see if it can hold up in benchmarks.


For the benchmarks part i am going to run my normal suite of storage benchmarks and will see how it performs.

*Test System* 
Intel Core i5 2500K 
Asus P8Z68 Deluxe 
Kingston 1600Mhz 8GB DDR3 
Western Digital 320GB HDD (WD320AAKX)
Adata Dash Drive HE 720 
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 
Noctua NH D14 with GT 1850 fans 
Ghetto made bench table 
Corsair AX 1200W 



Now lets see how the benchmarks stack up

*Atto Disk Benchmark*:
One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives an opportunity to test with various file sizes.
This benchmark is a preferred among manufacturers as ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb with a ques depth of 4.

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/ATTO_8MB.jpg
Overall speed seems strong for raw data,with speeds often touching 90+ MB/s for read and write operations.


*Crystal Diskmark*
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data. Crystal DiskMark scores usually drop a bit when comparing to ATTO and this is the result of the testing data now being primarily incompressible representing movies, music and photographs.
*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/Crystal-disk-mark_1000MB.jpg

Crystal Diskmark also shows same kind of speeds.
lets check out the other benchmarks.




*AS-SSD:*
Added to the benchmark suite is this nice little German application called AS SSD Benchmark. This test gives an extensive result set. The test is popular, so I included it.AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the worst case scenario in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data.I will be using the copy and compression benchmarks from this tool to show some real world data transfer rates.

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/as-copy-bench.jpg

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/as-compr-bench.jpg

*HD Tune Pro 5.00*

HD Tune Pro is a hard disk utility and benchmarking utility for Windows. This tiny application allows you to scan your hard drives for errors or take a deeper look at several performance figures coming from the storage unit.

We used the included benchmark utility.

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/hdtune_read.jpg

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/hdtune_write.jpg

Speeds will be a bit low since HDtune works with incompressible data.

*Aida 64*

Aida 64 is one of those multi faced benchmark tools which can help you to benchmark almost all components of a system.

The module we will be using measure access time.

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/Aida_avarage%20disk_read.jpg

*www.ocfreaks.com/imgs/adata-dashdrive-he720/Aida_avarage%20disk_write.jpg

Overall it seems good..maybe not The best but it holds ground.



One may argue why portable HDD's exist when we have high capacity thumb drives and low powered hard disks.
portable HDD's fill a specific category where the user need something that has higher capacity of  a traditional HDD along with the portability of thumbdrives,hence the rise of portable HDD's.
As such we see a constant battle between performance and ergonomics.
the drive we reviewed today is one such example of mix of beauty and performance.

lets list out the Pro's and Cons..shall we?

Pro's

Good performance across the boards.
Compact size.
Nice finish.
Cons'

USB 3.0 Cable is a bit short.
The outer side tends to catch a lot of finger prints.(yes,i am nit-picking).
Backup button doesn't work in all applications.
So all in all we have a drive with good performance and drop dead gorgeous look.its a must have if you love to show off your gadget.

From my side 3.5/5...a few points docked for functional reasons listed above.

A special thanks to ADATA for providing the sample and to my team for supporting me throughout the review.



until next time..
Sumon Pathak


----------

