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: 
i have lost my usb chord, does anyone know where i could buy another one?
Very detailed and greate review provided on the unit and it helped me a lot.
thanks much,
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.
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.
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.
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!!
So you can’t use this on a dell computer?
Yes you can use on Dell.. anything with USB port will work
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.
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?
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
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.
Mine has toshiba mk1652gsx. It is easy to open, top comes out if to use a little force.
Cheers
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.
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……..
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.
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.
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!
Hi, i have one of these drives, except it’s usb only. I connected it to the usb ports on the front of my case and didn’t got detected by windows even though the blue lighs were on, then I plugged it on one of the ports in the i/o backpanel and worked perfectly. The same happened with a friend’s pc, seems like most front case usb ports don’t have the necessary power to for the hard drive, so you may need to plug it on the back or if that doesn´t work use a Y shaped usb cable to plug it on two ports and get double the power. Formatted it to ntfs and is working ok so far.
I bought one of these and it works on 3 out of the 4 computers I have. This is disappointing given what you want one of these for! Verbatim kindly sent me ausb y lead although I think it should have been shipped with one anyway…but that still didnt work. I would avoid these drives at all cost!
James (from England, UK)
i was totally disappointed with this VERBATIM 160GB. many time i reformated the drive…i will absolutely tell to my friends that buying this item is not a good idea..!!!!
I got my Verbatim 160 in January 2009 from BigW Townsville for $88.
It is running like a dream under XP SP3 FAT32.
Tickled pink.
Will NOT work with my Vista 64-bit. At least, I HOPE that’s why the blue light is blinking.
SO help me if Verbatim lost ALL THIS DATA ON ME.
Much the same story… worked well initially but now the pc grinds to a staggering halt and nothing seems to work, least of all transfering or recovering date from the verbatim storage… £47 I shall never see again. Staples should be informed of this piece of crap and stop selling it immediately. harumph!!
People please. Calm down. First connect the drive, USB will detect it and then open folders within. OK, if you want to keep the software contained, save it to your internal drive and then. FORMAT the existing FAT system to NTFS for Windows XP, Vista, Dell Laptop, etc. Format to Mac system for Mac (excuse I know little about Mac). Now then, save whatever you wish to store on your Verbatim external drive. These are not intended for booting: OS. Running programs or software. We buy these mostly to increase portable storage capacity. Used for entertainment: Movies, Photos, what-have you. So, that we can transport from 1 computer, pc, Mac, or laptop to another, situated anywhere. Plug it in and away we go. The drive I have here is silent, cool, rapid, so far, perfect. Format took 15 seconds. Sexy blue LED confirming active. Time alone will test durability. So, far I am satisfied, no complaints. Access speed is faster than internal 2.5″ drive and faster than some 3.5″ external drives that I use. I suspect it may be SATA, but cant open the case, so not able to peep inside to verify.
I bought a 320G verbatim in June and all of a sudden, the usb port is recessed into the unit…Now I have the hassle of mailing it back to the company…looks great doesn’t scratch but we all know, how many of these $150-200 units are we supposed to buy a year to be sure not to lose our data! Make these units reliable!!!!!!!! they sure cost enough!
In March 2009 I purchased a VERBATIUM, 160 GB and only once have I been able to use it. I THINK it might have my genealogy data on it but now I can not tell as I can not get it to open. Golly, for 70 bucks, I expected it to work, do I have to go out and buy another brand????? GEE WHIZ.
I can’t believe they are making hdds now, not worth the time, i’m sticking with my western digital drives, never had one fail on me yet still have a 60gb still going strong.
Cheap piece of crap. It burned up my front USB panel. I sent it back on an RMA and got another one and it did the exact same thing on a different computer. Verbatim will not talk to me. They keep rebuffing every attempt by telling me I have already been given an RMA. DO NOT BUY unless youw ant to risk burning up your USB circuitry.
brought a 160gb maybe a year or so ago and was great while it lasted – well it did what it was purchased to do. ive maybe used it 30 times in the space of 10months.
this thing is absolute garbage and wont work in any computer and from reading others comments its a waste of time contacting verbatim. not only did i have work on it, i also had all the batman animated episodes!!!
to its credit, it makes a great door stop though…
I brought the Verbatim from Offise max. Tried to install #160 Model #JH8923 on my e-machine with no sucess. I have Vista computer.
I get no icon to identify that it’s working. I plugged the unt into another computer and got the same results. Can you help me out?
Ken Maier
PS: officemax wouldn,t help at all
I got a verbatim 160. I used it for back up data it worked wll with vista and xp professional.
All of a sudden it stop working. On vista does not recognize verbatin drive and on xp it stop loading
and get freezed. The blue light is on and the hard disk run. I hope can get back the data.
i have the 120GB and i plugged it into all the usb ports and nothing worked, i could hear the drive working but it wasnt detected on my laptop, how can i fix this easily?
i hate verbatim protucts well at lest my hard drive it worked for 1 day then it never worked again so i will never buy or tell anyone to buy from verbationn again……………………………………………………….