BIOS: Technology Means Business

The growth of digital media such as video, audio and pictures is driving the demand for portable storage devices. Plextor has developed a compact, stylish, and reliable external hard disk drive in the form of the PX-PH04U. The 40GB model reviewed here isn't exactly huge in terms of capacity (80GB model also available), but its fast USB 2.0 connection, highly portable compact form factor and consistent performance provide optimal transfer rates in an easy-to-carry package. And the need for no external power source will be a boon for frequent travellers. If you're looking for a portable storage solution that's both light on the pocket and budget, the PX-PH04U is an excellent choice.

Pros: Low cost; great design; quiet; write protection switch
Cons: USB only; no shock, encryption or backup features

The first thing that strikes you about the PX-PH04U is that it offers the same premium quality associated with Plextor optical devices. The brushed aluminium casing is pleasing to the eye, and the blue and red front-mounted LEDs look stunning in a dark room. Another impressive touch is the useful write protection switch at the rear of the drive that allows you to lock the device to prevent accidental erasing of data.

The aluminium body of the 2.5in. external hard drive is about as compact and stylish as you're likely to see. Its also available with a storage capacity of either 40- or 80GB, which although isn't exactly copious in today's digital world, should be more than enough for general usage. The PX-PH04U supports systems running Windows 98/SE, ME, 2000 and XP, as well as Mac OS 9.0 or higher. File systems supported include FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS.

The PX-PH04U connects to computers using either a USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 connection - there's no option to use FireWire, Type II PC Card slot or parallel ports. A single USB port is located at the rear of the drive, along with a 5-Volt AC power socket. However, laptop users will be pleased to know that the drive can be used independently of a power source when it's plugged straight into a powered USB port. Indeed, no AC adapter is even supplied with the product.

It's plug-and-play compatible too, so those running the latest versions of Windows or Mac OS won't have to install any drivers, and it's also hot swappable so you can connect or disconnect it from your system without having to reboot it. This is a real benefit if you intend to use the drive frequently to exchange data between colleagues or different systems throughout the day.

Portable USB drives aren't really sold on speed because they're much slower than regular hard disk drives. For instance, hard disk drives for desktop PCs generally have rotational speeds of 7200rpm, seek times of about 12-milliseconds (ms) or less, and many improve their performance through a technique called caching. Having said that, there are drives that have rotational speeds of 15000rpm, seek times of less than 10ms, and large buffers (16MB in some instances) to further improve performance.

But it's pleasing to know that the PX-PH04U is an excellent performer for this type of drive, highlighted by Business Disk WinMark 99 and High-end Disk WinMark 99 scores of 9260 and 21800, respectively. The 5400rpm drive has an 8MB buffer and offers a maximum data transfer rate of 480Mbit/s (USB 2.0) and average latency of 5.56ms (access time of 21.3ms). What this means in real life is that from a clean format you can expect data transfer speeds of around 29.3KB/s to 18.3KB/s.

From the performance graph below you can also see that the drive's read performance is relatively consistent towards the edges of the platter, proving that the drive's head consistently and reliably find pieces of data on the disk. It also doesn't use many system resources, shown by a CPU utilisation result of just 3.36 per cent.

Unfortunately, Plextor has cut back on some value-added features found in some competing products. While this inevitably helps to keep the cost of the product to a minimum, it's surprising that there are no built-in shock protection or data encryption tools, or even any data backup software, which may deter frequent business travellers.

By comparison, Amacom's Flip2disk (£265 ex. VAT) is supplied with proprietary backup software that allows you to perform a mirror image backup of all the contents of your computer's internal hard disk, including the boot sector, system files, personal and network settings. A DataSync utility on subsequent insertions lets you synchronise data on both your computer's hard disk and Flip2disk, helping to ensure that data on both disks are identical.

Similar to all Plextor products, the PX-PH04U is covered by a Fast Warranty Service - 2-year warranty in the EU, Norway and Switzerland (collect and return) and 1-year in other countries. This market-leading service guarantees to have a fully operational hard disk drive back to your desk within five working days - completely free of charge. The drive also comes with everything you need to use it straightaway, including a USB cable and brief getting started poster.

About our tests:
BIOS uses VeriTest's WinBench 99 version 2.0 to test the performance of a hard disk drive. Its scores tell you how well a hard disk performs when executing disk operations. Because the test reproduces the kind of disk activities applications carry out, you can use the results as a guide to the kind of throughput you can expect to see when working with a hard disk's subsystem. In most benchmarks, the higher the score, the faster the component. However, in the Access Time and CPU Utilisation tests, the lower the number is better. This is because access time is the time from the start of one storage device access to the time when the next access can be started. CPU Utilisation measures the percentage of total processor time the PC spends running that test. The less time the CPU spends on the test, the more time it has to do other things. On the Disk Inspection graph, the left-hand side of the graph is the direction to the outer radius of a platter and the right-hand side to the inner radius. Dynamic change in a speed within a zone means unsteady recording density or read performance.