A-DATA Nobility NH92 320GB Silver
The Nobility NH82 is a new external hard-disk from A-DATA and comes in 3 sizes 250, 320 & 500 GB and a few color flavors including silver and light-blue. I have had the drive for 2 months now and have decided to write a full review of this stylish drive.
Design
The footprint of the device is surpringly small, mesuring only 114 x 75.8 x 12 mm(LxWxH) and with a weight of only 150g it makes it an easy carry anywhere. The exterior is aluminium foil molded in a very specific way, having very fine concentric grooves, like a vinyl record. It gives it a very specific feel when touching it. All in all it has a very simple yet classy look.
I read that this is supposed to be the slimmest external hard-disk, but I would take that as an disadvantage. The 2 most important things you want to have with a hard-disk is fast data access and security. A slim foil of aluminium is what protects the hard-disk from the "dangers" of the outside world and I'm not too excited to see this. Probably thinking the same thing, the A-DATA guys provided a leather-like pouch to put the hard-disk in. The pouch is really nice and I find it quite stylish but most importantly it seems to offer the protection that the disk needed, both against scratches and impacts.
Ports? what ports ? The A-DATA NH92 has only one small USB plug but hey, it's a hard-disk, what more could you want.
Internals
The device is buit around the 2.5" hard-disk and adds an aluminium casing and a SATA->USB interface adaptor.
Real life capacity, formated as NTFS is 312.5 GB reported by Total Commander and 298 GB by Explorer, will have to figure wich one is more correct thant the other :). Anyways, it's a 300GB more or less disk.
Heat & noise
The hard-disk is almost silent in real use, you can't really tell if it's on or not. To see if the drive is on the drive has a blue LED that flickers when the drive is in use. In terms of heat the drive is just slightly warm in average use but does get hot if you have a lot to back-up but cools down quick. On a Windows XP system the drive is stopped after a few minutes so it conservs energy while generating no noise or heat. Spin-up time is about 2 seconds wich I consider a decent time to wait considering the advantages.
Read/Write performance
The read/write tests were done using Total Commander 7. Because this is an external hard-disk there was no point in testing small file transfer speeds (like an Operating System would have) so I performed 2 tests:
- 1. Large, contigous file: DVD image 4.650GB
- 2. Mix of pictures and small movies 2.625GB (900 pictures of about 2MB each & 500MB as 7 movies)
The tests represent 2 of the most typical needs you'll have, copy large files (movies & games) & copy pictures or music.
Here are the results:
| Test | A-DATA to *PC | *PC to A-DATA |
| DVD 4.650 GB | 2:55s = 26.6 MB/s | 3:20s = 23.3 MB/s |
| MIX 2.625 GB | 2:08s = 20.5 MB/s | 1:51s = 23.6 MB/s |
Windows Explorer seems to copy a few senconds faster than this so the speed might rise a little, up to a maximum of 28 MB/s. There was no mistery here, as a standard hard-disk the A-DATA NH92 is largely limited by the USB 2.0 interface and delivers good speeds for these restrictions.
(*) The PC in the test is a Lenovo X200s notebook with a 7200RPM HITACHI hard-disk runngin Windows XP SP3. The test was carried out using 2 USB 2.0 ports to ensure that the hard-disk gets enough current. None of the hard-disks were empty or recently formated though they were both defragmented recently. While testing I had other applications running (browser, winamp) but none of them using the disk.
One might ask why test it like this? Because real life speeds are the only ones that matter! This is a consumer product and in real use you will never have freshly formated disks and will most likely have other applications running in the background, even more than I did now.
In the box
If you can open it :) you will find:
- the hard-disk
- a mini USB to 2 full-size USB adaptor
- the leather-like pouch
Conclusion
Good:
- small & light
- simple yet stylish look
- as fast as a USB device can be
Bad:
- none so far
Ugly:
