LG External HDD XD2

The XD2 is a tiny drive, and lightweight too — although the compact casing makes it actually feel pretty solid. And the black or white body designs are appealingly simple, although they look a little bland.

Still, the LG has other things going for it. With a street price of £64 exc VAT for the 500GB model, it’s one of the cheapest portable drives we’ve seen — although in terms of pence per gigabyte, it isn’t as predictably cheap as a desktop model.

The best bit is that the LG’s low profile and low price don’t mean low performance. The LG’s casing trumpets its advanced chipset, and in our 3,000-file test the XD2’s average read and write speeds of 28.7MB/sec and 15.2MB/sec were exemplary. 3GB file results were very strong too, averaging 32.9MB/sec for reads and 24.8MB/sec when writing.

Given the price, the package is light on extras. The single mini-USB connector and rear-facing activity light represent the whole of the XD2’s sparse feature set. There are no nifty extras or accessories beyond the included USB cable, and the two-year warranty could feel a little short when competing drives offer three and even five years. The supplied software isn’t much of a draw, either: PC Clone EX Lite does its job, but there are free alternatives that work just as well.

But while sophisticates may be willing to fork out for flair and fancy features, sometimes all you want is a cheap, simple drive that won’t leave you hanging around. And that’s a role the LG XD2 fills admirably.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith