Actually, I tell a lie – the full title for this product is the “Dynadisq III High Speed USB 2.0 Portable Storage & Backup Solution for Fujitsu 2.5″ SATA Disk Drives” (say that in one breath 5 times)!

Title aside, this is one of yet another series of pre-packaged drive & enclosure solutions being bandied about the market today. These solutions are gaining interest with a lot of consumers because they generally manage to undercut the combined cost of buying the same hard-drive and enclosure separately, so much in fact that many users who only need the drive, buy the solution package, rip out the drive and discard the case because in some cases (pun not intended), it can be cheaper this way.

Cost aside, what if you simply need to have a cost-effective external portable backup solution with minimal hassles? That immediately calls for a notebook hard-drive that can be powered by the USB data cable.

A quick trip down to the weekly gatherings of some of my favourite vendors saw me come across Fujitsu’s answer to the masses – the intriguingly named Dynadisq III unit, available in several sizes. I am using the 320GB model for this review.

For AUD$130 you get:

• A single 320GB SATA 2.5″ notebook-sized hard-drive.
• Smart-looking matte silver enclosure with mini-USB, 5v external power and a small “Backup” button with some moderate styling and the Fujitsu logo embossed on top (the hard-drive is already pre-installed in the enclosure). The top side also features two LED’s – one green one for power and a red one for the obligatory activity notification. No blue LED’s in sight.
• A nice fake-leather pouch with a pocket and elastic strap to hold the drive, and several side pockets for cards and, er… stuff.
• A USB to mini-USB data lead.
• A USB to 5v-power lead.
• One-page “getting started” instructions (for Windows users only despite saying the unit will work on a “range of different computer operating systems”).
• A 50MB backup application installation CD-ROM (again, for Windows only).

The components come all packaged in a neatly presented and protected cardboard package.

The drive and case itself is lightweight and generally attractive to look at, with the fake leather pouch putting a bit of sophistication into the package, but then again, who buys an external hard-drive to be sophisticated?

Unfortunately, while the idea seems nice, the pouch just ain’t big enough to hold both the drive and cables together.

Plugging it in

Upon plugging it in to my Ubuntu Intrepid desktop, dmesg reported the following:

Nov  9 14:59:49 lamaar kernel: [ 1018.916011] usb 8-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.055454] usb 8-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Nov  9 14:59:50 lamaar kernel: [ 1019.056230] scsi9 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.060657] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     FUJITSU  DYNADISQ III     1.95 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.062645] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063018] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.063640] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] 625142445 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064017] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.064023]  sdf: sdf1
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084377] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk
Nov  9 14:59:55 lamaar kernel: [ 1024.084467] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0

So far so good, but not less than a few seconds later when GNOME tried to present the drive, the following dialog reared its ugly head:

Well, that confirms that it’s formatted for Windows out-of-the-box. Shame on Fujitsu for not properly unmounting the drive during factory testing! And what an exciting volume name they gave it too. Rather than shamelessly promote themselves, Fujitsu simply left it as the Windows-standard “New Volume”. Yay.

I was curious to find out if there was any included software on the drive itself. Maybe If I was lucky there would be random photos of factory workers testing the drives? Maybe I could find secret launch codes for Ballistic Nerf Missiles in the Southern Atlantic? Who knows what I could find?

I quickly fired up Virtualbox, setup the Fujitsu drive as a USB device for my Windows XP Virtual Machine and fired up. Upon checking the content of the drive, I was presented with… nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Totally empty. What a disappointment.

I did a proper disconnect on the drive and shut Windows down. I then fired up GParted to repartition the drive for Ext3.

GParted reports the drive as only containing 302GB of physical storage space, which follows the whole 1,000MB versus 1,024MB in a GB debate that always surrounds drive sizes.

Repartitioning the drive into a single giant 320GB partition took just over 3 minutes to complete.

Turtle or Hare?

So let’s try some real-world file read/write tests.

I decided to go with the following basic tests involving the copying of data:

1. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to RAM
2. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to my aging Samsung 160GB IDE external USB notebook HDD
3. Copy from my desktop hard-drive to the Fujitsu Dynadisq III 320GB SATA external USB notebook HDD

Timing was done by hand with a stop watch from the triggering of the copy action to the closing of the file transfer progress window.

First up, let’s copy a single 2.2GB DV video file.

According to GNOME’s Nautilus, RAM was pulling a transfer rate of 85.4MB/s, the Samsung drive was pulling 30.2MB/s and our review Fujitsu was pulling 40.5MB/s – a notable difference over the Samsung.

Next up, we copy 7,762 small files all between 10K and 25K each (total 146.9MB) comprised of various image thumbnails:

Nautilus didn’t have much time to evaluate the speed. RAM took less than a second to complete the copy, my Samsung drive took 3.65 seconds, and the Fujitsu took a paltry 2.98 seconds.

Finally, we go and copy 2,987 medium-sized files comprised of digital photos in various subfolders all between 250K and 1.5MB in size (2 megapixels max resolution).

Nautilus reported RAM pulling a transfer speed of 71MB/s, my Samsung drive did 32MB/s and the Fujitsu triumphed over the Samsung with 39MB/s.

So the Fujitsu shows an average 21% performance benefit over my little Samsung IDE unit. Not bad.

The Backup Button

Earlier I pointed out that there was a “Backup” button on the back of the drive labelled simply “Backup”. The intended use is to perform a one-touch backup of all your important data onto the external unit. Sounds great, except that it doesn’t work. Well, at least under Ubuntu it doesn’t work. The system does not recognise any press of the button – not even as a keyboard multimedia button.

The supplied CD-ROM contains the driver and backup application for use with the Backup Button, but unfortunately, it’s Windows only.

This is hardly a concern, though. You can easily throw an icon on your desktop to execute a script to backup all your important data and Linux in general has unparalleled methods for regularly backing up large volumes of data with ease, such as rsync.

Aesthetics

So what more can be said about this drive? Well, it’s quiet – barely a chirp from it. It also gets a little warm, but not overly hot when doing large file copies. No biggies.

It certainly looks like a nice unit – clean design, not trying to overtly stand out. The power and activity LED’s are non-intrusive as well unlike the bright blue LED’s you find on some units.

Probably the only real downer I can say about it is the juice consumption, but this is probably unavoidable, really. The main reason I still like my little 160GB IDE unit is that it is one of the last capacities to not really require additional power. Whilst conducting my tests on the Fujitsu, I did encounter moments where the drive was reporting back to the system hard-errors and at one point simply unmounted itself. Disconnecting and reconnecting it fixed these issues and a quick run of fsck showed that there were not any actual errors on the drive. Once I had hooked up the second USB power lead, the problems never manifested themselves again.

Conclusion

One of the main reasons people use notebook USB drives for portable storage is for their convenience. Not only for their size, but for the fact that you can do data and power over one lead. This one requires two for any major file operations, and while that may be an inconvenience for some, it’s still a helluva lot better than having to hook up a power brick to run a 3.5″ desktop drive.

SSD’s (and to a lesser extent, USB flash drives) are still a long way off from completely replacing hard drives, and at this stage are far more expensive GB for GB, so until then, this little drive suffices nicely. It’s small, tidy, fairly quick, had a good pouch which will offer some knock protection, and while not as small as a USB flash drive, it easily fits into most pockets.

All up, this is a drive worthy of notice.

Review score: 8 out of 10

Many thanks to fellow Ubuntu compatriot Blinky who supplied the unit for review.