Following up on my review of the SkyDrive service, I thought I’d review something I purchased recently. Is it the most tacky gadget I own? Possibly. But, it is the cheapest 500GB external hard drive I have seen.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Michael Jackson!

What possessed me to buy it, you might ask? Well, blame the other physics nerds – one found it, and the great deal got emphasized to everyone… Now like 8 people in university own it. It really is that fucking good a deal, at £38 with free Amazon delivery, that is under 8p per gigabyte.

Why so cheap? Well… if my sources are to be believed, they are hitting rock bottom in high streets too. It seems that people are in fact put off by the hideous gold plastic cover, and not at all swayed by the included digital movie of ”This is It”. Maybe I would watch it if it wasn’t horribly DRM’ed… no, actually I probably wouldn’t.

Ok so perhaps some actual information. The drive is Samsung, and of course has a usable capacity of less than 500gb due to the on-going nonsense where they measure a gigabyte in their own imaginary scale where gigabytes are 1000 megabytes, which are 1000 kilobytes etc. In the real world the rest of us know that bytes work in 1024s, or 2 power 10. Don’t we have advertising laws?
The casing itself is cheap in look and feel. It is a crap plastic, with a distinctly 90s kids toy texture on the black back. I’m not at all worried about the back though on appearance, the front kinda removed visuals as a concern. I should say that you do get a Samsung black sleeve that the drive fits in and can be used in, eliminating visual concerns.
You also get a shortish usb cable, perfectly adequate. It doesn’t require a secondary power cable or usb.
The drive is also small enough to easily slip into a pocket.
It comes with some software for backing up and security, but personally I recommend forgetting about it and just getting PortableApps.

I don’t know what more to say really. The drive won’t win any awards; it isn’t the fastest, or the most pretty, but its quiet and small, portable and cheap. Did I mention cheap? Yeah, hard drives are continuing to get bigger for less money but this really is cheap. If you are looking for a cheap way of backing up, storing, moving, data, this is great.

Just don’t expect people to react well to the look. Could be worse, they could think you’re a paedophile or something…
…Sorry Michael, but it was too obvious to pass up!

Pros:

• Cheap
• Quiet
• Large capacity
• Needs no extra power cable

Cons:

• Gold
• Michael Jackson

Check out the product at Amazon!

Peace, out!

Matt

UPDATE: Price is now back up to £50!