Freecom Hard Drive XS review

Freecom claims that its Hard Drive XS is the smallest 3.5in external hard disk in the world and, at first glance, it's hard to disagree: like the preceding Mobile Drive XXS, the only thing keeping the hard disk itself from exposure to the outside world is a thin rubber shell, through which protrudes the power socket and mini-USB port.

While this does mean that the XS is a mere 31mm thick and weighs just 700g, this lack of size comes at a cost to build quality. Peel open the rubber covering and the only thing protecting the 500GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 drive is a thin layer of plastic with no concession to protecting the disk at all. The Freecom certainly isn't a drive we'd want to take away from our desks any time soon.

The Freecom's performance wasn't quite up there with the best external drives, either. With our 300MB group of small files, the XS was decent when reading but far slower when writing: the A-Listed Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus took 24.8s, but the Freecom consistenly took over a minute and a half.

The XS took 21.7s and 25.4s to read and write our 650GB file but, again, the Maxtor was a more consistent performer, taking 22.1s and 22.7s to complete the same tests. Performance when reading and writing our 1.5GB file was also patchy: the Freecom was almost half a second quicker when reading the file, but four seconds slower when writing it.

Thankfully, the Freecom's price is more enticing than its performance: at £54 for 500GB, it's a tempting deal if a 1TB drive will prove unnecessarily capacious ??" the A-Listed Maxtor may cost 9.6p per gigabyte and offer good value on paper, but it's not worth spending £90 if you won't use a terabyte of storage.

However, it's worth considering that the drive inside this Freecom would only cost you around £40-45 inc VAT on its own, which puts the price tag in a different light. The premium you pay on external hard disks is generally for the casing that contains them; when that casing is a bag of rubber, we're not sure it's a premium we'd pay.

Author: Mike Jennings