Hitachi LS-1000-EMEA 3.5-inch 1TB Simpledrive External USB Hard Drive
Posted by admin | Posted in Hitachi | Posted on 31-03-2010
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- Hitachi SimpleDrive Rev. 3 Hard Disk Drive
- Capacity: 1TB
- Interface: USB
- Enclosure: External
- -
Hitachi LS-1000-EMEA 3.5-inch 1TB Simpledrive External USB Hard Drive
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When this product arrived [a day earlier then expected], its came with an unecassary amount of packaging.
This product itself looks great though, small and compact with grip on the base to avoid it falling off your computer base.
This device works wonders.
It doesn’t have that annoying humming sounds like most and has a pleasant soft blue light.
This product itself is easy on the eyes and is quick at tranferring all my files from my computer onto it.
I highly recommend it, especially if your running low on computer space like i was. It quick, simple and does the job!
Rating: 5 / 5
Bought the LS1000 – 1Tb to sit alongside a Mybook.
Didn’t buy the Mybook again because of the price. Also I became concerned on reading a number of bad reviews of the Mybook which flagged up reliability as an issue. Not what you want to hear when for me it is a backup unit.
Wondered a bit about Hitachi as a name I hadn’t really heard of in relation to hard drives but decided to give it a go….
The Hitachi arrived with very quick delivery: It works great and looks brilliant- nice bit of design. All the black bits gleam. It has a lovely substantial feel to it. Also a good weight so no tipping over. Very quiet when working. Quick enough and working well straight out of the box.
It is smaller than the Mybook it sits beside and – dare I say it – I think better looking. The photos don’t really do it justice…
Cheaper, better looking, apparently more reliable. What more do you need to know?
Rating: 5 / 5
While the ‘passport’ size drives (of which I’ve owned many) are really starting to catch on to the idea that consumers *expect* the drive itself to work, and that the purchasing decision rests on price, facility and form, the bigger drives have been slow to get the message. Aesthetically challenged at best, and I’ve had two 3.5″ drives out of the six I’ve bought simply not work. Well this is the first time I’ve delighted at the price, but actually made ‘out loud’ joyful noises as I’ve taken this Hitachi beastie out of the box. LOL indeed, and who really does?
The picture doesn’t actually do the object justice. It’s compact, not at all ‘blocky’, relatively light, rigid and when you take the protective film off the plastic end pieces they shine piano black to make the design look distinctly classy. I’m pretty sure the main casing is aluminium; certainly there’s no trace of flimsiness. The upright design just looks right – nice small footprint and businesslike enough to be in full view. Seriously, I’m going to sell off my other two terabyte drives and buy two more of these to sit alongside this one. Why did it take so long to arrive at a product like this?!
I can’t comment on the onboard software; although there was one app for PC users and one for Mac, I always strip drives out straight away and Mac format them. When I did this I noticed two things: first was that I only seemed to lose less than 1gb of available storage. Second, it turns out that the other two drives connected – the internal drive and a Lacie portable – both had Hitachi innards too, and given their sterling service so far, I feel assured about this new one.
First thing after formatting was to transfer the music on the Lacie onto the Hitachi. 320gb took just over 3 hours, passed without a hitch, and all seems well. The drive was pretty quiet, and remained very cool to the touch throughout (more than can be said for the MacBook during the process). There’s a light along the sides of the unit that glows in a subdued way when connected and flashes when the disk is reading and writing. It’s bright enough to see in daylight but doesn’t blind you and light the entire bloody room at night, like the little Lacie.
And that’s it – what else could you want? Functions perfectly, great design, great price. More facilities? Maybe a firewire or second USB connection if it didn’t push the price up much. But the new improved USB will be out soon, and I’m sure that will be incorporated on all the new drives that come out then. If Hitachi are reading this – well done. How about a simple, discrete system for connecting multiple drives without tons of spaghetti cable? Crack that one out and I’ll buy another five of these, I promise.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ve recently bought this drive for use on a home PC that I also use as as server to the other PCs in the house.
As others have said, the drive looks smart, remains cool to the touch, and powers down when connected PC is shutdown (it automatically powers on again when the PC is restarted).
However, I will now talk about the software that comes with this drive.
The software can be installed on any PC that can ’see’ the drive either locally connected on your network. It allow you to do both a full backup or an incremental backup. In order to keep my home PCs secured, I have done a full backup of all of them (it was fastest to use a wired connection for this over the network as wireless can be a bit slow for very large volumes of data) and now all machines are set to do an automatic incremental backup every Friday night (when I leave all machines on to do their weekly virus scan and, now, their weekly backup).
When you backup you, naturally, have the choice about what folders you want backed-up.
To restore, you can either use the provided software, or access the files directly on this drive as it is all pretty obvious where they have been stored and the folder structure.
Overall, a good drive with simple and effective backup software.
So, why you ask, only four stars and not the full 5 stars? Well, the drive does seem to be a bit noisier than I would have expected and you can hear the head rumbling around when the drive is being accessed. It’s nothing serious, but it might be an irritation if the drive is right next to your laptop when you’re trying to concentrate on music or a film. You decide!
So fours stars it is then.
Rating: 4 / 5
I agree with everything the previous reviewer said.Hitachi have set the mould here with a sleek and good looking unit which I think compliments my work space.It performs faultlessly is quiet in operation and apart from the low level blue LED flashing at the base whilst working you wouldn’t know it was on.I didn’t bother with the included applications, It arrives formatted to FAT 32 so I did a quick format to NTFS and that was that.A great price for what I think is one of the best units on the market.
Rating: 5 / 5