‘Book Mystique Review: Pininfarina-Designed 500 GB SimpleDrive Hi-Speed USB 2.0 External Hard Drive
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
by Charles W. Moore
SimpleTech’s SimpleDrive Hi-Speed USB 2.0 External Hard Drive is one of the most visually arresting computer peripherals on the market, but it has lots of function and engineering goodness to go with the great looks. I’ll get to that in a moment, but this thing is just drop-dead gorgeous. If you’re not a car person, the script reading “Pininfarina” that appears on both flanks of this hard drive may not mean much of anything to you, so here’s the back-story.
Most everyone has heard of Ferrari, and Carozzeria Pininfarina is the Italian design house and coachbuilder that has styled most Ferrari automobiles beginning in 1952, as well as certain models of Maserati, Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, Nash, Peugeot, Austin, Morris, Riley, Wolseley, MG, Jaguar, Volvo, Alfa Romeo, Ford, Citroen, Fiat, Mitsubishi, Honda, and Lancia. There are other illustrious automotive design firms in Italy, such as Bertone, Ghia, Touring, Frua and more, but arguably Pininfarina represents the pinnacle. Over the past 77 years, Pininfarina has turned out hundreds of the most alluring and beguiling automobile designs ever conceived.
Battista Farina was born in Turin, Italy, in 1893, the tenth child in a family of 11, and consequently nicknamed “Pinin” or “the little one.” He started working for his older brother Giovanni’s carriage repair shop, Stabilimenti Industriali Farina, at age 12, learning bodywork and beginning to design his own cars. He designed the body of the Fiat Zero when he was 17.
In his mid-20s, Farina visited the United States, and met Henry Ford, who was impressed with the young man and offered him a job in Detroit. However, Farina declined and returned to Turin where in 1930 he founded his own design shop called Carrozzeria Pinin Farina, bankrolled by a wealthy aunt and in partnership with automaker Vincenzo Lancia. The company specialized in designing and building a limited production runs of coachbuilt automobiles.
In addition to his work for Lancia, Farina turned out designs for FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Cadillac, and even Mercedes Benz during the 1930s. By 1939 Carrozzeria Pinin Farina had 500 employees in several countries and was turning out 800 cars per year when World War II interrupted the company’s stellar trajectory.
Picking up in 1946 where he had left off, Farina was soon back in the thick of the automotive world, producing designs for the American automaker Nash (which later merged with Hudson to form American Motors, which ultimately was annexed by Chrysler), and in 1952 began his company’s long association with the legendary Ferrari.
In 1961, Battista officially changed his surname to Pininfarina, as he had been known informally all his life, and his design firm became Pininfarina as well. When Battista Pininfarina died at age 73 in 1966, control of the company passed to his son, Sergio, under whose leadership it has continued to expand and prosper.
For a taste of Pininfarina’s work, check out the galleries and multimedia videos on their Website:
http://www.pininfarina.com/
and here:
http://technorati.com/tag/Pininfarina
In recent years Pininfarina has branched out beyond automobiles into other areas of industrial and interior design with the Pininfarina Extra unit of the Pininfarina Group that specializes in interior and product design, formed in 1986 to extend the Group’s services, quality and skills ..., one of their most recent efforts being this new SimpleTech SimpleDrive External Hard Drive.
“Like high-end sports cars, which marry performance and aesthetics, we set out to make the most beautiful desktop storage products on the planet,” comments Paolo Pininfarina, Deputy Chairman of Pininfarina Group and CEO of Pininfarina Extra. “With its unique shape, smooth lines and rich colors, the new SimpleDrive family is designed to catch attention. Paired up with the engineering under the hood, and they’re true trophies of technology.”
Indeed, photos simply don’t do the SimpleTech SimpleDrive justice. For one thing, it is a lot larger than it looks in pictures, measuring 5” x 8.25” x 1.5”, or about the size of a 1/24th scale model car, and while that might be regarded as a shortcoming in some contexts, with this unit the design is so elegant that its imposing dimensions are not only excusable, but demand to be seen. This object has presence and deserves prominent display.
In profile, the SimpleDrive unmistakably brings to mind the shape of a contemporary sports racing car, not that it’s a scaled-down caricature of any particular automobile. This is very much an original piece of design art in its own right, but its automotive lineage is unmistakable, with Ferrari-esque touches like the boldly scalloped louvers on either side of its wedge-shaped nose.
Aside from its unique and seductive shape, another bold design decision was to offer the SimpleDrive in a variety of colors, with each respective color indicating the capacity of the drive, to wit: Fire (or Ferrari?) Red (160GB), Pearl White (250GB), Sapphire (320GB), Onyx (500GB) and Charcoal Gray (750GB) and Silver (1TB) .
Our 500 MB test unit is thus Onyx, or jet Black with an extremely high gloss finish, which looks terrific, and I much prefer gloss to the matte black finish of the MacBook. It does show dust and fingerprints, but it’s a pleasure to keep this baby polished.
I’m an aficionado of fine design, whatever the object, and this SimpleTech SimpleDrive is truly a feast for the eyes, but as I noted in the preamble, there’s a lot more to it than high style alone.
For example, there’s its sheer capacity. The test unit at 500 gigabytes has 2500 times the capacity of the 20 MB MacCrate hard drive that came with my first Mac PLus 15 years ago. It’s one hundred times the capacity of the drive in my first generation iPod, and five times the capacity of the largest hard drive in any of my computers. A 500 MB hard drive will hold 127,000 songs, 366,000 photos, 542 hours of video, or 60 hours of HP video. And if that’s not enough for you, there will are those even bigger versions with half again and twice as much capacity as this one. “Awesome” is hardly adequate.
This 500 gigabyte drive is, however, more than adequate to swallow up my modest MP3 and MIDI collections, all of my photo archives, back up my entire journalistic and literary output for the past decade and a half, all of my OS X and Mac OS Classic software and installers, with ample room left over for anticipated expansion well into the future. In short, my entire digital history since I started using Macs can be accommodated on this drive with more than 400 GB to spare.
A USB 2.0 device, the SimpleDrive nominally offers up to 480 Mb/sec transfer speeds and its hard drive is a full-size 3.5-inch desktop 7,200 RPM unit. Unfortunately, as is usual with USB 2 peripherals, real-world data throughput falls short of the theoretical maximum, and while I didn’t time any formal comparisons, data transfers for backups and whatnot do seem significantly more leisurely than they do with my FireWire external hard drives, which are all 4,200 RPM units. The medicine for that is to get the optional USB/FireWire Combo SimpleDrive Deluxe version of the drive, which will also remedy the other notable shortcoming of the test unit - its inability to function as an OS X boot volume. USB 2 is also not supported by a lot of older Macs still in service. You can still mount the drive through a USB 1.1 port, but you don’t want to be transferring very large files.
On top of the drive housing is an oval-shaped “Capacity Meter,” which illuminates to indicate the amount of storage space still available on the SimpleDrive. The LED ring, which is in a cool blue, has four sectors respectively representing one quarter of the drive’s storage capacity. For example, if one out of the four sectors is lit, your drive is a quarter full, and so forth. When SimpleDrive is powered up, the Capacity Meter illuminates to provide visual indication of the amount of available storage left on the drive. When available storage space falls below 10 percent, the capacity meter flashes red for 10 seconds, and then goes off. The capacity meter remains off until you press the One-Click backup button to back up the data on the drive. Whenever SimpleDrive is turned on and available storage is below 10 percent, the Capacity Meter flashes red for 10 seconds, and then goes off.
The center of the Capacity Meter oval is actually a oversized “One-Click Button” which you can press to launch a “total media backup” of the files on your computer to the external drive. The One-Click Backup support software comes pre-installed on the drive (about which more in a moment for Mac users). You can use this software to schedule manual, custom, daily, weekly, or monthly backups.
With the SimpleDrive’s One-Click Backup button, you can instantly launch backups of selected files and folders on your computer. Just configure the ArcSoft TotalMedia Backupapplication to perform a scheduled backup, then press the One-Click button any time you want to back up your computer’s hard drive.
A progress bar keeps you informed about how the backup is proceeding. To restore your files, just select the desired backup archive and click the Restore button.
Windows-users can also use the bundled software to burn data to optical disks (CD-R, CD-RW, or DVDR/RW), to create custom CDs and jukebox CDs, using MP3, WMA, and WAV files, and to create DVD discs from digital video files.
On the back panel of the SimpleDrive (which again reminds me of the tail-end of an FIA sports-racer) are a USB 2.0 port, a D.C.-in socket for connecting the SimpleDrive’s 12 volt power supply, and and on/off rocker switch.
Extending consumer value, purchase of a SimpleText SimpleDrive also entitles you to a free 2GB myfabrik.com ( http://www.myfabrik.com ) online account to store, organize, embed and share your personal or professional content online. With the myfabrik.com service, you have the freedom to share multimedia content and other digital files with individuals or groups either privately via email or publicly via your own “easy-to-create” personal Web page. You can also match-up different file types to create slideshows and media players; quickly post content to sites such as eBay via links; or embed myfabrik widgets into blogs and social networking sites to promote easy content sharing online. Because the service is Web-based, you can access your photos, video, music and other files from any Internet-connected computer anytime, anywhere. You can also upgrade the account to provide more space for a fee.
So, enough with the features and styling profile; what’s this drive like to use?
The package comes with the drive itself, a USB cable and a 12-volt AC power adapter, and a CD.
If you’re a Mac user, you will first need to reformat the drive. The SimpleDrive is default-formatted as an NTFS volume, which provides read-only access for Mac OS X. If you intend to use your SimpleDrive primarily with Macs, you will obviously want to format it as a journaled HFS+ volume, or if you anticipate using it with both the OS ex and Windows, it can also be formatted as a FAT32 volume. I don’t have much truck with the Windows world, so I went with HFS+.
Oh yes, before formatting the drive, you will want to make sure to copy the One-Click Backup software to your computer’s hard drive at least temporarily, as the copy that comes preloaded on the drive will be erased during the initialization process. You can drag it back to the SimpleDrive once the latter is formatted.
To format the drive using OS X Disk Utility, Open the program and select the SimpleDrive in the left column list of mounted volumes, choose Mac OS Extended from the pull-down menu, and the initialization will take a minute or so. The next step is to run the backup software installers from the copy you dragged to your hard drive. There are two installers: one for the Total Media Backup Software, and another for the SimpleTech Button Manager. The former doesn’t require a restart, but the latter does, so install them In that order.
Upon installing the software and rebooting, I found that the SimpleDrive didn’t automatically remount, and it was necessary to turn off the power switch and then switch the drive back on, at which point it showed up on the desktop. However, the drive remounts just fine when waking the computer from sleep.
SimpleTech describes the SimpleDrive as “designed for quiet operation.” “Quiet” is a relative term I suppose. The drive is not really raucous, but it whines like a turbine spooling up and then settles down to a subdued but very audible hum. Happily, the drive automatically spins down if there is no drive access for 10 minutes or so.
Using the SimpleDrive and the bundled software is pretty intuitive, but if you have any questions there is a good the illustrated user manual included on the CD that ships with the package.
A variety of backup protocols can be configured using the Total Media Backup software, including automated backup scheduling. I found that it took about two hours to back up the 23 gigabytes or so of all my non-system file content from the 80 gigabyte drive in my 17-inch PowerBook. Unfortunately, the Total Media Backup application, which seems to be a port of a Windows application, was a pretty sluggish customer on my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of automated backups in general anyway. I don’t disparage them if you find that’s the only way you get around to backing up your data, But I’m a hands-on kind of guy, and although I’ve tried various backup software solutions, I always return to just doing manual backups by dragging files and folders in the Finder. I try to keep my data archives organized in a way that makes this method as efficient as it can be, and it doesn’t really take that long.
Which brings us back to my only point of real dissatisfaction with this SimpleTech SimpleDrive - its lack of FireWire support. USB 2.0 is OK, but my gut tells me that in real world use, FireWire 400 is significantly faster than the actual throughput you get from nominally faster 480 MB per second USB 2.0. And even more importantly, FireWire is bootable (indeed zero-hassle bootable) on the Mac. USB 2.0 isn’t. Happily, the SimpleDrive Deluxe version is available with a combo USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 I/O interface. If bootability (and FireWire’s greater speed) are not priorities for you, the standard USB 2.0 SimpleDrive will do the job and both versions represent a delightful melding of style and function.
Incidentally, while our test SimpleDrive was a High-Speed, full-size desktop 3.5” unit, you can also get that same gorgeous styling in a smaller package (about the size of a 1/32 scale model car), since SimpleTech also offers a line of Pininfarina-designed portable USB 2.0 hard drives based on notebook-type 2.5” 5400 RPM drive modules rather than the full-size 3.5” 7200 RPM units used in the High-Speed SimpleTech models. Not that 5400 RPM is any slouch.
There are five SimpleTech Portable USB 2.0 Hard Drive models available, all with these features:
Slim, compact & stylish (designed by Pininfarina)
Ruggedized for travel
Hi-Speed USB 2.0
Form Factor: 2.5 inches
Rotational Speed: 5400 RPMs
Buffer Size: 8192 KB
Height: .63 inches
Width: 3 inches
Depth: 5 inches
Weight: .26 lbs
One-Click backup software (Windows only)
No external power required
Plug n’ Play and Hot-Swappable
Free and unlimited technical support
3-Year warranty
As SimpleTech notes, these little drives’ sleek lines and ultra-low profile styling makes you want to put them on a shelf and stare, but they’re small enough to easily slide into your pocket for ultimate portability.
The five models and MSRPs are:
SimpleTech 160GB SimpleDrive Portable Hard Drive - 160 GB - $159.99
SimpleTech 120GB SimpleDrive Portable Hard Drive 120 GB - $113.16
SimpleTech 80GB SimpleDrive Portable Hard Drive 80 GB - $104.99
SimpleTech 60GB SimpleDrive Portable Hard Drive 60 GB - $99.99
205660.jpg
Street/mail-order prices may be lower.
For more information, visit:
http://www.simpletech.com/
Back to our test High-Speed 3.5” drive unit:
System Requirements
• PowerPC G4 400 MHz (recommended)
• Mac OS X (10.2.8, 10.3 or 10.4) operating system
• 100 MB free hard disk space
• 256 MB RAM recommended
• Available USB 2.0/1.1 port or (SimpleDrive Deluxe) FireWire 400 port
Specifications
Specifications subject to change without notice.
Hard Drive 3.5 inch, 7200 RPM
Capacity 160GB, 250GB, 320GB, 500GB and 750GB available
Cache Buffer 8MB (minimum)
Seek Time Less than 10 mSec
Transfer Rate Up to 34 MB/sec
Interface USB 2.0 compliant, 1.1 compatible; FireWire 400, 1394b compliant, 1394a compatible)
Interface Transfer Rate USB 2.0: Up to 480 MB/sec; FireWire 400: Up to 400 MB/sec (SimpleDrive Deluxe only)
Power External AC power adapter; 100/220V, 50/60 Hz AC input, 1.5 Vdc output
Operating Temperature 41° to 95° F (5° to 35° C)
Operating Humidity 5 - 95%, RH non-condensing
Compatibility Windows and Mac users (preformatted for Windows) - Windows 2000, XP, Vista,
MacOSX
Dimensions 8.2 in. x 5.1 in. x 1.5 in. (209 mm x 130 mm x 40 mm)
Weight 2.0 lbs. (0.91kg)
What’s Included
• SimpleDrive external disk drive (pre-loaded with ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup software)
• AC adapter and power cord
• USB 2.0 cable
• FireWire 400 cable (SimpleDrive Deluxe models only)
• Quick Start guide
• Warranty card
Manufacturer’s suggested pricing begins at $99 for the 160GB model.
Visit http://www.SimpleTech.com for local distribution channels and outlets, and for further details about SimpleTech warranty and unlimited technical support programs.
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For North American retail sources, click here
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