Review: Hitachi SimpleTough 500 GB USB Portable External Hard Drive

We were recently sent a Hitachi SimpleTOUGH 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ST/500GB (Carbon Fiber) to review, so that’s just what we did. We reviewed the heck out of it. This drive’s unique proposition is that it’s ruggedized and is shock and water resistant.

The exterior is has a weird textured yet smooth surface with rubber on the edges to absorb spills and falls. As you can see above, the USB cord itself is more like a thick cable than a wire and tucks into the back of the drive itself. The only downside there is that the cord is very short- so it’s not a problem to plug into laptops but for desktops it could get a little hard to place.

Sizewize, the drive is small but not tiny- it’s easy to hold thanks to the curved shape. Since Hitachi claims this a a tough drive and can handle drops up to 6 feet, we wanted to give it the full workout. We loaded up some data on it from the computer, with no problems, and handed it to our first test subject- the tough Belgian, to go crazy with it. It seemed like a great idea, but our test subject was very reluctant to interact with the drive in any way. Belgian Shepherds apparently do not like hard drives. Maybe we should have smeared some peanut butter on it first.

Well that didn’t work- so we had to go to plan b- the junior intern. The intern (and since he’s a “junior” intern, he doesn’t get to be called by name but instead just by “the intern” like all other interns) put this drive through the ringer. Dropping it on the hardwood floor, shaking it, running around with it, even trying to eat it (to test the water resistance, natch). He really earned his pay (nothing) with this review, maybe we’ll promote him to junior assistant blogger soon. Here’s the junior intern in our test lab, trying the hard drive out:

After all that testing, we plugged the drive back in to see if it the computer would still recognize it and the data was still there. And it worked just as it did before our testing! No problemo. The ruggedized design held up to the toddler…err junior intern’s abuse. So in summary- the drive does what it should and would be ideal for traveling or just throwing it into your bag without having to worry much about damaging it.