500-Gbyte Fujitsu HandyDrive

Aug. 12, 2009

Technology editor Bill Wong takes a look a Fujitsu’s half terabyte external USB HandyDrive.

Fujitsu’s HandyDrive line now tops out at half a terabyte. The 500 Gbyte external USB HandyDrive (see the figure) is like Ford’s first car, black. It definitely has a sleeker look and it is a lot to pack into a 2.5-in hard drive. The price per megabyte (about $0.26/Mbyte) tends to be lower than the competition depending upon what price you can find it at.

The drive is contained in a durable plastic case but the drive is likely to be more durable than the case. The Rampload protection technology provides shock resistance. The connection to the PC is via a USB cable that also provides power. There is an connector for an external power supply should the drive be used with a USB host that cannot supply sufficient power or if you want to conserve host battery power.

The USB 2.0 interface supports transfer rates up to 480 Mbits/s. The drive has an 8 Mbyte buffer. The average access times 12ms and 14ms for read and write respectively. Rotational speed is 5400rpm.

The bundled software is designed for Microsoft Windows although the drive itself with work with any operating system that can access a USB hard drive. The packages bundled with the system include the Acronis True Image Personal HDD, Hard Disk Password Lock Tool, and the Hard Disk Format Tool. The Acronis True Image Personal HDD package can make an image copy of a hard disk for backup and restore purposes.

The HandyDrive comes with a 3 year warranty. It is also available in capacities starting at 250 Gbytes.

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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