5. Testing and Summary

Data transfer speeds on external USB 2.0 storage devices simply can’t compare to hard drives that move files around using internal interfaces like SATA, RAID and SCSI. A comparison between the two isn’t very useful, and expectations for each should be different.

That said, the SimpleTech Signature Mini tests on the slow side of USB storage devices. This chart shows how comparable models, like the Western Digital Passport performed. That 40-GB drive managed to eke out an average of 23 MB/s write speed — the speed at which the drive writes data to its disk — while the SimpleTech, at 250 GB, managed an average write speed of only 18.7 MB/s.

The Signature Mini fared better during its read-speed test, which measures how fast a computer’s hard drive can read data from the external drive. It managed an average read speed of 32.7 MB/s, which was faster than several previously tested drives.

While the Signature Mini may not whip data around as fast as some drives, the sluggish transfer speeds are only noticeable when conducting a first backup (doing this would take hours on any drive). With small-size backups and transfers, the drive is not noticeably slow.

Testing Score: 3/5

Like most hard drives, the usable storage space is not the same as what is labeled on the box. A 250 GB hard drive is measured by your computer to be about 232 GB. This is because one billion bytes multiplied by 250 does not equal 250 billion bytes.

Summary

With the Signature Mini, SimpleTech is able to cash in on a consumer trend: All things being equal, the most important factor in choosing an external storage device is the way it looks. After all, price per gigabyte is dropping. One way to spice up a hard drive is with cute casing and useful storage software. SimpleTech has successfully managed the former, and offers better options than most on the latter. The Signature Mini will appeal to iPod owners who like to work a color scheme into their peripherals. MacBook owners will like it too, but they might be better off sticking to the drive as a simple storage device rather than relying on the Web storage software (non-existent so far) and the desktop storage software (Time Machine does a better job). For Windows machines, SimpleTech’s software is a very solid choice for Web-based storage software.