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Packaging
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| Box front | Box back | Box lid | Box inside |
To reinforce the idea of environmental friendliness, the box for the [re]drive is very green. The front features the drive itself on a green background, with the product name, capacity, and a few bits of promotional text. Flipping it over, we find a bunch of ad-copy extolling the ecological virtues of the product, along with the feature list presented previously. Slitting open the packing tape and lifting the lid, we find yet another blurb, this one reminding us that yes, this drive is covered in real bamboo. Flipping the lid up, we find printed on its underside the only instruction manual you're going to get. No special procedure required here, just plug in the data cable, plug in the power adaptor, and the drive should show up in your Explorer window just like any other.
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| Box contents | Drive front | Drive rear | Drive side |
Inside, we find the drive itself, packed between a pair of cardboard caps. While this is certainly more ecologically friendly than styrofoam, Your Humble Reviewer had some doubts about the ability of this packaging to cushion the drive from shocks, bumps and drops during shipping. As you all know, FedEx and UPS both delight in playing kickball with people's packages at times, so a bit more padding would have been welcome here, if only for peace-of-mind. Still, the drive arrived with no bumps, chips or dings, so everything should be in order.
The small, dark-green lid at the bottom conceals the accessories, and once everything is pulled out, we're left with the [re]drive itself, an AC adaptor, and a USB cable. Minimal packaging indeed! The front of the drive is fairly bare, containing only a printed-on label and the power/activity light. The rear of the drive has a handful of stickers on it, including the detailed product label, the serial number, and a pair of "insert screwdriver here to void warranty"-style stickers.
Looking at the side of the drive, we get a better sense of the esthetic SimpleTech was going for. Both top and bottom panels are covered in sheets of pressed, unvarnished bamboo, and while the panels are sanded smooth, it's still possible to feel the joins in the wood where the strips were joined together. The side panels are corrugated in a pattern perhaps meant to be reminiscent of a bamboo forest, continuing the nature theme.
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| Getting started | TurboHDD USB Configuration | Joggle start page |
Included on the drive are a few programs, tied together with a quickstart app that shows up on the root of the drive. The format entry gives you four options: "Best format", which gives you a little blurb on which format you should use for your system; "Formatting for PC" (NTFS); "Formatting for Mac" (HFS+); or "Formatting for Mac and PC" (FAT32). Curiously for something billed as Mac and PC compatible, the drive comes preformatted as NTFS, which means mac users will not have access to the drive's contents without some help at first.
TurboHDD USB is the other interesting bit of software. Functional only on Windows at present, this program is supposed to improve transfer rates over the USB bus, though by how much is left unsaid. We'll take a look at the drive's performance with and without TurboHDD USB enabled as we run through our benchmark suite.
Joggle is apparently a web-based media hosting and tagging service. While potentially interesting, it has no bearing on the drive itself, and will be set aside for this review.
The other two bits of software, TotalMedia Backup & Record and Fabrik Ultimate Backup, have been covered in detail in our review of SimpleTech's Signature Mini drive, and are functionally unchanged from then.
REALTIME PRICING