A-DATA SH93 Rugged Portable Hard Drive Review

Oh my! This is quite an intriguing piece of hardware- and its fairly cheap too. Great review I enjoyed reading it.
 
Why do these rugged electronics all come in yellow? To match the colour of JCBs?

If you drop this on water, that is not very clear and the disk is colored black, good luck fishing for it. If it sudenly drops and you are working in the field, in the mud, snow, a forest or whatever case (I mean common, this is not something to buy for taking it around a library unless it's a pool library :p), would you see a 2,5" black square?

Yes, that's why they come in bright yellow or bright red.
 
If only something like this came out sooner, I've dropped my external enough times to need something like this. I'm just surprised I've only killed two hard drives in the process both of which I was able to exchange for new ones, gotta love Best Buy and their knowledge less staff. Also the data that was on them at the time wasn't important.
 
Now if they just used a WD Black edition HD instead of Fujitsu... Oh well, you can't have everything. On second thought, at least they didn't use a Seagate... :)
 
That's a fantastic price. I'm going to pick one up for sure. Great for a tech to carry around on the job for backups/etc.
 
Well, I found it in a few stores in my country with a price tag of 130$ for the 500GB and the 250GB it says End Of Life!?. The 640GB is priced even higher - 170$. Anyway it's a "must have", not necessarily the A-Data brand, for the features it offers. Guess the 500GB version from A-Data will be my next acquisition and also my next gift. Thank you for a very well tested - reviewed product!
 
i have an external HDD that i took on a plane with me and the guys who loaded mt luggage broke the case and it was almost completely destroyed but with my good luck the drive still worked i put it back together and found none of the data missing. I just wish it would have been this drive because i had a lot of pictures and the like that i could not replace on that drive i was so worried i had lost them. this is a great product and i for one am thinking i will pick one up :)
 
Since this is plastic, I assume it is not fireproof like some other protected external hard drives, but other than that, it looks like a very solid product (no pun intended). This reminds me of that Toughbook review where they gave it to a tiger, used it as a dart board, and shot it with various firearms.
 
Probably I will not buy this for the years coming but I just wanted to say that I really like the picture and the colors of the hard drive. My first impression when I saw the picture was: what is that tank?:))
 
Finally I can go jogging with my hard drive! lol jk Sounds neat, next they should make it fire proof so if any accidents happen at home your information could be recovered.
 
Who really need this? this is like water protection for the battery but not the laptop.

I don't understand it is in no way like that?!?!

- You do understand that a portable drive is something you carry right?
- Something you carry is also something you have the potential to drop.
- When dropping something you could do it on a hard surface or in water.
- If you do so with the ADATA SH93 the biggest problem you will face is bending over to pick it up.
- If you do so with a typical portable hard drive chances are you have at the very least damaged the case or worst the hard drive, meaning not only do you now have to bend over to pick it up but you will also face the inconvenience of loosing all your data.
- So to answer your question if you have the foresight to know that you are never ever going to drop, bump or knock your portable hard drive then NO you don't need the ADATA SH93, but for everyone else who is not clairvoyant the ADATA SH93 is a pretty cool idea.
 
bought this yesterday here in toronto canada for $99 (500 gigs at canada computers) formated it to wbfs to use as a uloader for my wii and am loving it.it's so small like a wallet and looks cool as well.
 
I took this backpacking with me for 4 months. From South Korean winter @ 10 below zero to Philippines spring 100+ degrees F. It survived salt water, getting dropped, rain, 100% humidity, sand, snow, getting frozen (literally ice frozen to it), and 7000+ft altitudes. Not to mention it was in a back pack getting shaken harder than a San Francisco martini the entire time.

Not to mention I plugged it into dozens of hostel and cafe computers with more OS's than I can count and it worked on EVERY one of them.

No data lost, no issues at all. I cant even begin to describe how much I would recommend this.
 
I buy one like this – 500 gB, I copied around 5 gB on it and the device stopped working, it lost its partition, must format it and lose all data. Maybe nice outside, but **** inside.
 
I buy one like this – 500 gB, I copied around 5 gB on it and the device stopped working, it lost its partition, must format it and lose all data. Maybe nice outside, but **** inside.

I still use our review sample all the time, I treat it like **** and its works perfectly. One of the most durable and rugged external drives I have ever owned.
 
@Guest, @Steve - I know this is responding to an old review, but I'm getting these things dropping like flies after about 6 months at two different sites who are using them for server backups. I've switched to Seagate Expansion which are proving to be a lot more reliable. I'm getting the same kind of drama as @Guest - after couple of backups they drop their formatting completely, WBADMIN won't recognise them and it's time to delete the partition and re-add them to the backup set.
 
My adata SH93 is so incedebly SLOW I hardly use it, even formatting it will take hours, putting 8GB on it, hours, i am sorry to say but even an old pata100 drive in an external housing is way faster than this adata **** :'(
 
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