Verbatim Store 'n' Save 1TB SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Review @ ModSynergy.com
By: Michael Phrakaysone
The trusty old conventional hard drive still has life despite all these years, it's crazy to think that its lasted since 1956 (only 5MB!). I laugh and remember my youth, I was so young and I think it was in the late 1990's that my uncle got me to help him build his new 386 computer from scratch. Back in the 386 PC days things were still big and bulky, my gosh it's been so long ha-ha.
I remember my uncle had a bunch of old computers, he had a 286 computer that had a massive 5.25-inch metal brick of a hard drove, that one could kill if thrown at someone! When my uncle got me to help him build his 386, those hard drives were the 3.5" IDE variety, still new at that time, I don't remember the exact capacity but it was I think under 1GB.
Well time surely flies, especially in the world of computing. The market now has hard drives that span from 500GB, 1TB, 4TB, all the way to 6TB, however, I just read that 8TB is coming very soon! It's so exciting to see the huge capacities now offered, however, on the flip side it's so scary to think about what would happen if you lost 8TB worth of information in one shot! That would be so disturbing, especially if it was important information. That's why I advise people not to put all their info in one basket. I'd personally stay with lower capacities unless in certain circumstances I needed and required the use of large capacity hard drives.
At the time of writing, 1.0TB seems to be the norm nowadays, the standard I would say, however, that's probably going to change with the addition of 8TB coming on shortly.
Verbatim is a that trusted name that's been business for a long time, most know Verbatim for their writeable optical media. Their optical storage mediums including writable CDs aka CD-Rs, DVD-R, BD-R, have made them a household name, they've been doing this type of stuff from the beginning.
Today I get to share with you regarding Verbatim's latest line of Store 'n' Save External Desktop Hard Drives. The product number I'm testing is 97579, the capacity is 1TB, and the warranty is an industry-leading 7-years. You'll get to see whether or not they are worth your hard earned money and get to see how fast they are utilizing the faster USB 3.0 interface. Enjoy the review.
About Verbatim
"Since its beginning in 1969, Verbatim® has been at the forefront of the evolution in data storage technology. Today, more than 39 years later, Verbatim remains one of the most recognizable names in the data storage industry.
Customer-driven, Verbatim is known for adding considerable product value--above and beyond its competitors--to established media technology. As an industry pioneer, Verbatim is recognized for the role it plays in early product development and commercial product introduction of new technologies. Verbatim's leadership role is especially apparent in the evolution of optical media recording including MO and the CD/DVD family of products.
Along with its technological innovations, Verbatim has always been recognized universally for its superior manufacturing practices. Verbatim was the first media company to receive ISO certification, the de facto standard for quality management systems worldwide. This commitment to quality translates into consistent product performance and reliability. In addition, Verbatim provides toll-free technical support and service to enable its customers to maximize the performance of its products.
As a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, a recognized world leader in the chemical and computer industries, Verbatim is ideally positioned to take advantage of changes in the market while continuing to challenge the frontiers of data storage."
Verbatim Store 'n' Save SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Product Overview
Experience transfer speeds up to 10 times faster with Verbatim's new USB 3.0 desktop hard drive! This Verbatim desktop hard drive comes with the fastest USB connectivity available. USB 3.0 connectivity helps you blaze through demanding tasks by reading and saving files faster. This desktop drive is also 100% compatible with USB 2.0.
This external hard drive features Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials software that allows full system backup and restore functions, the ability to schedule automatic backup by date/time and an encrypted backup option with password control. Save your precious photos, videos, graphics, music, data and more in ultimate safety with this Verbatim external hard drive. Also included are Verbatim's Green Button energy-saving software and Formatter hard drive formatting software.
Verbatim Store 'n' Save SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive Product Features
- USB 3.0 connectivity increases transfer speed up to 10x faster than USB 2.0
- 100% compatible with USB 2.0 ports
- Includes Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials Software
- Includes Verbatim's Green Button energy-saving software
- Features Verbatim's Formatter software, allowing users to easily format the drive to either FAT32 or NTFS (or FAT32 to HFS+ for Mac version), based on their own requirements.
- Enclosure design allows for horizontal or vertical orientation to minimize space requirement
- Ventilation slots allow for fanless, quiet operation
- Bundled rubber feet
- Industry-leading 7-year limited warranty
First Impressions
The Verbatim Store 'n' Save SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive comes in a cheerfully designed eco friendly packaging where it utilizes paper instead of plastic, making recycling easier and effective than with plastic. We live in a plastic world, with enormous amounts of plastic filling our landfills, and since there are many variations of plastic, not all plastic can be recycled local recycling facilities, therefore they just sit and take up space. But with paper having one variation, easier and possible to recycle.
I love the design of the box and I've always gave kudos to whoever is designing these at Verbatim, they are doing a fantastic job. Simple rectangular box but looks eye-catching with the bright orange color and signature dark blue Verbatim logo colors. You can easily spot this package on store shelves, its highly visible.
The box is highly informative with an actual product image to the right, information stating that its utilizing SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface that is up to 10x faster than USB 2.0, capacity information of 1TB, that it bundles Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials software, Green Energy Saving Software, and that it sports a super long 7-year warranty. Yes you read that correct, 7-year warranty, that's insane when you have others offering 1, 2, 3-year warranties. The longest warranty period I've experienced was 10-years warranty on a Patriot Memory SSD back a few years ago when SSD's first started coming out.
The back of the box contains even more information regarding Verbatim company information, product information, and more images of the Store 'n' Save SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive along with the fact that it includes a USB 3.0 cable.
The capacity being reviewed today is the 1TB production model. Other capacities available include 2TB and 3TB. I like the fact that the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive uses the newest and faster USB 3.0 interface, this will mean substantially faster transfer speeds than any USB 2.0 drive on the market, meaning you can be more productive and get more of your work done, instead of waiting for USB 2.0 transfers to finish. The great thing about USB 3.0, aside from the fact that it's faster than USB 2.0, is that it's also backwards compatible with the older USB 2.0 ports that everyone has, should you be forced to use the older interface.
Once you've opened the package, you'll find the Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive enclosed in a plastic bag and secured in foam on both ends of the hard drive. Other bundled items include a USB 3.0 cable, Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials backup software (on the hard drive - for Windows only), Green Button Energy Saving Software (on the hard drive - for Windows only), User Guide, AC Adapter.
Visual Inspection
The Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive comes in only a black color scheme, no other color variations are available, so you can forget about having a hot pink hard drive. The device color is matte for the top and bottom portions, and is shiny for the rest of the sides of the hard drive enclosure.
Verbatim has given some thought to its choice of hard drive enclosure, they haven't just dumped a hard drive in some basic flat angled rectangular enclosure like other vendors do. This one looks very nice, it has curves, angles, the style that others lack. The top portion is longer than the bottom, it curves downward to the bottom, which is shorter, and the front fascia is a shiny surface with a blue activity LED in the middle. The side profile of this hard drive looks so cool, I think it's the best aspect visually, it looks like sports car.
In its longest dimensions, the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive measures approximately 7.6 x 4.7 x 1.8 (inches) and according to my digital scale weighs 853 grams or 1.88 lbs.
The Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive is constructed out of mostly hard plastic from what I can see in the exterior, this is what helps it saves weight. It's pretty tough and it doesn't creak or flex like other cheap enclosures do, the plastic has a good thickness to it.
Some enclosures fight heat actively, with fans, and some do it passively, without fans, such as is the case with the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive. I like the fact that since Verbatim has chosen to go with a passive hard drive enclosure (no fans, silent operation, aside from the hard drive spinning), they have at least done it correctly by adding generous amounts of large ventilation holes in the sides so heat can be freely dissipated away.
Some passive hard drive enclosures are just really bad as they do not even have ventilation holes or the ventilation holes are tiny and few, I had an old LaCie external hard drive that had maybe 8 tiny ventilation holes. Heat is a killer of hard drives, and for that matter, many system components. The more heat to a hard drive, you better believe drive span will be short. The cooler a hard drive, the better as it this will ensure extended hard drive life.
Verbatim bundles a highly efficient Level V Efficiency AC Adapter power supply. It operates at 12V/1.5A. The USB 3.0 cable is of high quality, not the thin cheapies, but the thicker high quality cables. It's length is long enough to place and operate the hard drive on top of your desktop tower with ease.
What Kind of Hard Drive is Inside?
When I connected the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive to my computer, it instantly installed and revealed what kind of hard drive is inside the unit I am reviewing. Verbatim selected the Samsung HD103SI EcoGreen F2 Drive.
I'm not too sure if Verbatim sticks with one manufacture, but there's only really two major hard drive players, Seagate and Western Digital. Samsung used to be its own hard drive entity, but is now part of Seagate.
The Samsung HD103SI EcoGreen F2 Drive contains 32MB of cache and runs at 5400RPM, while making use of 500GB platters, this one having 2 platters of 500GB to achieve 1TB.
It's advertised to be one of the lower power consumption hard drives on the market and it now it makes sense why Verbatim bundles the Green Button Energy Saving Software, as this drive supports spinning down when in idle mode, and spinning up again when you use the drive. I personally elect not to use any type of software that enables spin down and spin up of hard drives as I don't like the start stop feature and I think it affects hard drive life and operation.
When connected to the PC, the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive is already pre-formatted and ready to use out of the box. Pre-installed on the drive is the various software and electronic manual. There is a flash based auto run service that will allow you to see all these different software: Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials, Green Button Energy Saving Software, and Verbatim HD Formatter. You're also able to transfer all of these software out of the Verbatim hard drive into your own local hard drive, should you need the extra 397MB of space.
Verbatim's Hard Drive Formatter software allows you to format to NTFS, FAT32, and or convert from FAT32 to NTFS format. I'd just use Windows own hard drive format tool, it does the same exact things and more.
Performance Testing and Results
The goal here is to simply verify how fast the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive can get. Verbatim doesn't actually provide any sort of performance numbers of the Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive aside from only that delivers up to 10x the transfer rate of USB 2.0.
It'll be interesting to see what the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive can do in real life situations. The USB 3.0 interface (Renesas USB 3.0) is used in our ModSynergy Test PC consisting of an Intel Core i7-2600K and Intel DP67BG (B3) P67 chipset motherboard with native USB 3.0 support.
One synthetic benchmark is used in the form of CrystalDiskMark, which uses incompressible data.
The other test is a real-world verification tool called H2testw. The program was not originally intended as a benchmark, but after I used it, I felt that it was actually one of the best real-world tools to test USB drive performance with. I'm going to use this program from now on because it very useful in a couple of ways. The premise of H2testw was to detect counterfeit USB drives by verifying the capacity.
Some drives on eBay (and others) advertise a product, for example, being 16GB, though in reality when using H2testw to verify its capacity, it's really 2GB because the firmware is hacked to trick the drive in thinking it's bigger than it actually is. H2testw verifies the integrity of the drive by writing random data to the drive, and then goes back and verifies if that written data is good or corrupt.
While filling up the drive, the program also monitors and tracks how long it takes to write to the drive (write speed), and it tracks how long it takes to verify the drive (read speed) producing the read speed and write speed in Mbyte/s and the length of elapsed time. I really feel this is a great way in directly comparing drives. It's as simple as looking at the elapsed time, the shorter the time, the faster the drive.
So the results revealed to me that the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive is one fast external hard drive! I love how its read and write performance is virtually identical and well matched.
In the synthetic benchmark of CrystalDiskMark, the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive manages a speedy fast 107.8MB/s read speed. For a conventional spinning platter hard drive, this is very good. Imagine having that to use on a portable hard drive!
If we compare apples and oranges, against a flash based USB 3.0 stick in the form of the Silicon Power Marvel M60 USB 3.0 flash drive, that one scored a read speed of 170.9MB/s, making it faster, however, that does not nearly have the superior capacity that the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive offers for the price. I'd say that's a great compromise.
In the synthetic benchmark of CrystalDiskMark, the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive manages for its writespeed test a speedy fast 107.0MB/s, virtually matching its read speed performance.
Let's do that same apples and oranges comparison again, against a flash based USB 3.0 stick in the form of the Silicon Power Marvel M60 USB 3.0 flash drive, that one scored only 70.68MB/s, making it slower than the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive! A spinning hard drive beating a non-moving parts flash drive is pretty interesting.
On to something more real-world, let's use H2testw to fill up the drive with 10GB worth of data, this would give you a better indication of what the drive can do in a consistent basis.
Well let's see the results from the H2testw test. 10000MB (or 10GB) were written to the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive, and completing in only 1 Minute, 37 seconds for a result of 102MB/s write! Now go and try that with your USB 2.0 drive and see how long it takes.
10000MB (or 10GB) was verified and read on the 1TB Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive, completing in only 1 minute, 35 seconds for a result of 104MB/s read. Again this is so refreshing to see.
So it's clear to see that the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive can easily and consistently achieve above 100MB/s performance for both read and write areas. To have both read and write figures so balanced and pretty much equally matched is fantastic. This will undoubtedly supply you with more productivity from less waiting. And to have that type of speed and performance from a portable drive offering you 1TB of capacity is really incredible. I've had no issues during my testing with the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive, it's been reliable without incident.
That moniker being used by lots of manufactures saying USB 3.0 is up to 10x faster than USB 2.0 is purely theoretical and really pretty much drive dependant, so it's always to varying degrees. If using the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive alone, I saw between 4-5x faster performance than if I used the same drive with a USB 2.0 port. Again this is all varying and dependant on the type of drive being used. If I used an SSD drive and compared USB 3.0 performance to USB 2.0 performance, the performance gap would be higher.
Where Can I Buy One? And For How Much? Oh yes that 7-year Warranty!
Right now you can own the 1TB Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive for almost 50% off list price, it's a really great and affordable price on Amazon.com, for only $94.24USD with free shipping. The drive is shipped and sold directly from Amazon.com so you can buy with confidence!
But be warned that there's only 4 left in stock, with more on the way, but at a later date and possibly higher price. So get them now using the link you see here ASAP.
I don't know why, but if you were to buy the same drive from Verbatim's own website, it would cost you $182USD, that makes no sense. Why buy at MSRP, when you can get the same for much less through Amazon?
If you require more space, then why not spend an extra $15 to get 2TB instead? $15 to get an extra 1000GB seems like a no brainer.
Factor in that the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drives come with a industry leading 7-year warranty, I'm not too sure you can get a better comparable drive! 7-years warranty is insane nowadays, usually I see 1, 2, or 3 years at best. 7-years warranty!
Some Amazon Deals That May Interest You!
Conclusion
It's hard not to love the Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive. I love the styling, I love how it contains generous big ventilation holes for heat dissipation, I love how balanced its performance really is and that it can easily maintain over 100MB/s for both read and write operations, I love the under $100 price tag, and I love the 7-years warranty that the drive contains!
Honestly I couldn't find any faults during my time testing and using the 1TB Verbatim Store 'n' Save USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive. It was flawless in my eyes.
It's indeed Editor's Choice worthy!
