Review: BUSlink USB Hard Drive
David Yee, 26 December 1999

The USB Hard Drive ($189 street) by BUSlink is basically a 2.5" notebook hard drive housed in an external case with an IDE to USB bridge. The USB Hard Drive is available in three capacities: 3.2 GB (the version tested), 6.0 GB, and 10.0 GB. The package is pretty much no-frills. You get the drive, an USB cable, the power supply, driver diskette, and a 2-page "manual." The drive is relatively small- about 2/3 the size of an external Zip drive. There are two LED indicator lights at the front of the casing to indicate drive access and power. The USB and AC power connections, along with a little black ON/OFF switch, are located at the rear of the drive. The AC adaptor power supply block that plugs into the back is a clunky 35 watter, and takes up plenty of real estate on the power strip. On the other hand, the aluminum and plastic casing is actually quite compact and feels pretty rugged, and the design is somewhat reminiscent of a miniature Catepillar machine.

Below are the specifications for the USB Hard Drive:

Installation was very easy on the test machine, which uses Windows 98 Second Edition. A simple setup program on a floppy disk installed the USB-to-IDE bridge driver, and without a reboot the USB Hard Drive can be plugged in and be detected by the OS. A new removable drive icon then appeared under My Computer, and a prompt to format the drive appears after double-clicking on it. During drive access, the drive makes a light chirping-like noises which were not any louder than a typical hard drive.

Performance was significantly slower than IDE hard drives. Despite the fact that the device is a hard drive that is capable of 33 MB/sec, its speed was limited by the USB interface, which has a top transfer rate of about 1.5 MB/sec. What is slightly surprising, however, is that the Iomega USB 100 Zip Drive (see review) was slightly faster in both synthetic and real-world tests, although the differences are not significant. Like the USB Zip drive, the USB Hard Drive did well in the CPU utilization test.

*Reported for comparison

Overall, The BUSlink USB drive is a terrific value. With it, you get 12 times the capacity of an Iomega 250 MB USB Zip drive at about the same price. In fact, since a single 4-pack of 250MB Zip Disks costs $70, it will cost well over $400 for an Iomega 250 MB USB Zip drive and enough cartridges to match the capacity of the BUSlink product. The USB Hard Drive is highly recommended for notebook users and people who don't have a spare IDE channel looking to add more storage. USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) versions of the product should be something to behold, and should hold a significant performance edge over the USB 2.0 versions of the USB Zip drives. 9/10

What's cool:

No-brainer, plug-and-play installation

3.2 Gigabytes of portable storage space

More bang-for-the-buck than the Iomega USB Zip drives

What's not:

Clunky 35 Watt power supply

Thin "manual" and no extras

Installation: 10/10 Performance: 8/10 Price: 9/10

CC Rating:

X 9

Test Bed: Celeron 466, 192 MBytes PC100 SDRAM, Asus P2B, IBM DTTA-350840 8.4 GB, IBM DJNA-351520 15.2, Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 27.2 GB Hard Drives, Windows 98 SE, Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE driver (from Windows 98 CD); Iomega USB Zip 100 and parallel Zip Drive were benchmarked for comparison