ADATA has put the drive in a solid, anthracite colored housing, which has a mirror finish on the top. This can actually be used as a mirror, but it is high maintenance because of it. Fingerprints and dirt stick out like a sore thumb. The manufacturer notes the weight as being 240g. We measured almost 200g for the drive and about 40g for the cable. There is just one interface at the back of the unit which is a USB 3.0 port. There aren’t any other USB 2.0 or power sockets available. We couldn’t find any problems with the power supply however. The test unit worked fine on all of our test units using USB 2.0 and 3.0 (MSI 880GMA-E45, HP Probook, Toshiba AC100, MacMini).

Our tools could not detect which type of drive was actually inside the casing. Based on the transfer rates however, we can conclude that it is a current model, which runs at 5400 rpm (as stated by the manufacturer). Using USB 2.0 interfaces the MacMini got 30,2 MB/s and the  HP Probook 28,1 MB/s. Both values are actually being restricted by the laptops themselves. Good desktops should be able to achieve 35 MB/s.

The USB 3.0 interface on the MSI motherboard allowed the ADATA to show what it is really made of. On HDTune (reading), we achieved a maximum of 89.6 MB/s and Crystal Disk Mark (sequential reading and writing) up to 91 MB/s.  This is the real limit of the hard drive that is installed, providing speeds which are 3 times faster than a comparable 2.5" with USB 2.0. The access times are around 17.2 ms. That is a pretty standard value for a regular hard drive. Only SSDs achieve significantly higher values. Please refer to our in-depth HDD Benchmark List for further information.