Verbatim 160GB FireWire/USB Portable Hard Drive
Manufacturer: Verbatim
Product Name: 160GB FireWire/USB Portable Hard Drive
Review Date: 09/22/08
Author:
Flash drives are nice, but they’re not large enough yet to take huge amounts of data with us, so that’s where portable hard drives come in handy. Of course you can get a large 3.5″ hard drive, but when portability is a factor you’ll want to look at the 2.5″ models as these allow us to take large amounts of data but yet remain lightweight and portable.
Today for review I’ve got the Verbatim 160GB FireWire/USB portable Hard Drive, it allows you to take large amounts of data with you and remain portable at the same time. The enclosure itself is plastic so it’s lightweight, and as the name suggests, it can be used with either USB or FireWire connections. The drive come pre-formatted for the Apple file system, but it can be easily formatted to be used with a PC as well.
So read on to check it out…
The Verbatim Portable Hard Drive comes in a display style box, with the drive shown on the front and information listed front and back.
Included with the drive is a user manual, Firewire cable and a USB cable. The USB cable features two USB connections as one is used for extra power if need be.
The enclosure itself is made of plastic so it’s very lightweight, it’s about as wide as other enclosure but it’s thicker, so that makes it a bit bulkier. There are four rubber feet on the bottom of the housing, and the back is where you’ll find the USB and Firewire connections. The appears to be small ventilation slits on both side of the connections to help cool the drive inside.
Specifications:
Verbatim 160GB FireWire/USB Portable Hard Drive
Expand the storage capacity of your laptop or desktop PC, with a sleek Verbatim Portable FireWire/USB Hard Drive. Whether you are on the go or at home, rest assured that your favorite music, photos, video and critical data are safe. Back up your MAC with a Verbatim’s FireWire/USB portable hard drive which is fully compatible with the Leopard Time Machine feature.
Product Number: 96529
Capacity/Speed: 160GB/5400 RPM
Specs/Features:
* Rotational Speed - 5400 RPM
* External power - FireWire or USB port
* Interface One 6-pin FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports, One USB Mini-B port
* Data Transfer Rate - FireWire 400 Mb/s (max), USB 2.0 High-Speed: 480 Mb/s (max), USB 1.1 Full Speed: 12 Mb/s
* Unit Dimensions - 3.38 in. X 5.38 in. X 0.63 in. (86 mm X 137 mm X 16 mm)
* Unit Weight - 5.8 oz (164 g)
Installation is fairly easy, if you don’t include the fact that it must be formatted to use with Windows. Formatting took about 45 minutes total.
The drive is quiet when in use, and it’s lightweight. The Enclosure is plastic, which is something that might concern me, most other enclosures I have or have seen are metal or at least partially metal. Metal enclosures not only help protect the drive but also help dissipate heat to keep the drive cool. I’m also not sure the type of drive inside the enclosure, either SATA or IDE, I couldn’t open it as this was a loaner unit, and didn’t want to damage it, also I couldn’t find any mention on the Verbatim website either.
Here’s a quick comparison shot of the Verbatim and two other 2.5″ HDD enclosures that I have on hand. The one on the left is an IDE drive, which the enclosure is part plastic and part metal, the middle one is an SATA drive with a metal enclosure and of course the Verbatim drive is on the right. The Verbatim enclosure is about the same width as the others but higher making it a bit more bulky.
For testing and comparison I ran SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage Benchmark, and compared the Verbatim to my 2.5″ 160GB SATA drive and an OCZ Rally2 Turbo Flash Drive. The higher the scores the better.
I used the USB interface only of the Verbatim drive, as I don’t have any firewire drivers to compare. You can see the Verbatim drive performs very well in testing, but we can see the Endurance Factor is rather low on this unit. (The Endurance Factor gives an approximation of the life span of the device.)
Conclusion:
The Verbatim 160GB Portable Hard Drive is not a bad little product overall, it’s fast and lightweight, making it nice and portable to take with you where ever you go.
The plastic enclosure is a small concern, but most people will be careful anyway with this product and others like it considering it’s a hard drive inside. As for heat dissipation and plastic, well it’s not the best for it, but there are ventilation holes on the back, only time will tell really if this system works or not.
Pros:
-Small and Portable
-Seems well made overall
-Excellent speed
Cons:
-Formatted to Apple file system
-Plastic Enclosure
Grades:
Overall: 
Design:
Performance: 
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24/10 - 2008 at 9:32
i have lost my usb chord, does anyone know where i could buy another one?
30/11 - 2008 at 13:22
[...] Verbatim 2.5” Portable Hard Drive USB Found these two: Verbatim 160GB FireWire/USB Portable Hard Drive InsideHW - Verbatim 500GB Portable Hard Drive __________________ vasishta-sushant on my Interest [...]
9/12 - 2008 at 21:23
Very detailed and greate review provided on the unit and it helped me a lot.
thanks much,
24/12 - 2008 at 9:07
Didn’t work with Vista Home Premium (flashing blue light instead of steady light) but was fine with XP. Work that out. :’-(
My powered hub doesn’t even acknowledge that I’m plugged in and the drive seems to try initialise unsuccessfully.
1/01 - 2009 at 23:45
The one part of the equation that you could not know about is the support or warranties on the Verbatim hard drives.
I had a 2.5 Portable 160 Firewire die on me in September (purchased in June) and after following Verbatim’s instructions to return it in September the company still has not resolved the issue.
If you have a problem with the device you are talking overseas while the company is in Carolina.
Two months after sending the drive back to them and numerous phone calls I am not sure I will every get my drive fixed. I would look at LaCie or Iomoega in the future for drives.
2/01 - 2009 at 5:44
I had just the opposite experience. It worked great on an HP laptop with 64 bit Vista, but won’t function on an older Dell laptop running XP Pro.
15/01 - 2009 at 22:39
I am absolutely horrified at the service that we are receiving from VERBATIM. The VERBATIM WILL NOT work on our Mac! We have had the VERBATIM formatted etc - this piece of garbage does not work on a Mac!!!! the VERBATIM works on the stores PC’s and our friends PC. When you plug the VERBATIM into ours the VERBATIM DOES NOT WORK!!! They told us they would send us a new VERBATIM???? What for? the VERBATIM will not work. Not only that, they said we have to return the VERBATIM at our own cost - $30!!! You’d think they would care about their products!!
21/01 - 2009 at 20:48
So you can’t use this on a dell computer?
22/01 - 2009 at 0:19
Yes you can use on Dell.. anything with USB port will work
29/01 - 2009 at 5:29
THIS PRODUCT Will NOT RUN ON MY PC OR ANY I HAVE TRIED TO DATE, I HAVE TRIED TO RUN IT ON MY PC RUNNING WINDOWS VISTA 64BIT BUT DIDN’T WORK!!. I WILL NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT NAME AGAIN!!!!. “VERBATIM WHAT A JOKE”. I HAVE NOT SEEN THIS PRODUCT WORK ON ANY PC YET, “MAC, XP HOME, OR VISTA 64BIT”.WHEN I CLICK ON THE ICON ALL I GET IS A MESSAGE PLEASE INSERT DISK INTO DRIVE, WHEN I TRY TO FORMAT THE DRIVE I GET THE SAME MSG , “I THOURT IT WAS A DISK DRIVE”.THANKS K BUT ANYTHING WITH USB WILL WORK HUH, I HAVE 6USB PORTS AND IT STILL WILL NOT WORK ON ANY OF THEM.
13/02 - 2009 at 6:51
i try to run this on a dell with xp and it’s saying i have new hardware but it’s not recognised.
am i doing something wrong?
14/02 - 2009 at 12:36
product is a peice of Junk, never again will i buy. It worked on my Vista PC for one month, then cut out suddenly and has competely destroyed all the data. I had 180 GB of Data, including all my photos, emails, documents etc. All gone and lost for good. I,m gutted, but i have learnt i wont use these product again
16/02 - 2009 at 21:58
I bought this for my mac from an Apple store, and it worked fine for few months, but then suddenly stopped. Now nothing can be read or written to the drive.
17/02 - 2009 at 18:41
Mine has toshiba mk1652gsx. It is easy to open, top comes out if to use a little force.
Cheers
5/03 - 2009 at 15:19
I have this device and this is what I think. This Hard Drive Is very small and compact as well as ship. The only problem is that most of the time it my laptop, desktop computer, and Xbox 360 doesn’t read it. This device is a serious problem and I don’t recommended at all.
7/03 - 2009 at 20:42
I have just bought one of these. In Australia we don’t get the fire wire connection. I thought the drive had gone faulty after I formatted it NTFS and kept getting messages from Diskeeper that it would only work in FAT 16 format. However it works fine and has a Samsung drive. So fingers crossed……..
6/04 - 2009 at 22:31
These drives must draw a fair bit of power, and not having an external power connector they will not run on a LOT of PCs I have tried it in. I have had it fail with a ‘device not recognised’ error on a Dell and a HP. Custom built PCs with decent motherboard hardware seem to work ok.
12/04 - 2009 at 5:30
Hi, I have one of these drives, it is a 320 GB USB only version. I want to know if anyone has removed the board that seems to be attached to the end of the drive to provide the external USB connectivity. I want to try to put the drive in my MacBook but don’t want to kill it trying to remove the board. Any help wold be greatly appreciated. Cheers.
16/04 - 2009 at 19:16
This afternoon suddenly the FireWire Portable Hard Drive is unreadable on MacBook…whereas it had worked at midnight…Will try to use USB contact, but I AM NOT PLEASED!