A-DATA Nobility

UPDATE: May 17, 2011:  The drive runs a little hot.  I am a little worried this may kill its longevity.  I've decided to remove it from my carrying case when I use it so the heat won't built up.

After a week of searching for my misplaced portable hard drive, I finally decided to purchase a new one.  With the advent of USB3, I decided to find a USB3 compatible drive.  Even though I don't currently have any USB3 ports on my motherboard, I plan on upgrading later this year when the Intel 2011 platform launches.  With that in mind, I decided I also wanted something fairly cheap, since, after all, it was an unplanned expense.  After scrambling through Newegg for a few days, I decided to pull the trigger on an A-DATA Nobility Series 500GB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive ANH01-500GU3-CBK, which also happened to be the cheapest USB3 drive currently available in the >=500GB range.

So far it seems to be a pretty decent drive.  Here's a few pics:

It has a mirror finish on the top, which looks nice.  However, this can also be a huge fingerprint and dust magnet.  I plan on leaving mine in a case, so I'm not so worried with the aesthetics of the drive.

Here's a few more shots:

Notice the new USB3 connector.  The drive can still be used on an old USB2 cable by hooking the old cable up to the left half of the connector.

For some reason, the drive comes pre-formatted with a FAT32 partition.  I went ahead and formatted it with an NTFS partition, since I have files >4GB in size.

USB 2.0 Benches:

The speeds are what I expected from USB2.  I've heard from a few sources that the USB3 speed of this drive is around 80MB/s.  Whenever I get access to a USB3 machine, I'll update the scores.

When writing files using Windows 7 explorer, it starts out at about 60-80MB/s, and then levels off at about 30MB/s with a deviation of about 4MB/s.  Not a bad drive considering the $59.99 price tag.