Adata Nobility NH01 review

Adata isn’t a huge name in external storage. But USB 3 drives are becoming a commodity, so it’s not unreasonable to think a small Taiwanese manufacturer might challenge the more established manufacturers.

Indeed, first impressions are positive. The NH01’s mirrored gun-metal case has a certain chic, and while the drive’s name sounds incongruous to western ears, the branding on the top is tastefully done.

Unfortunately, once you plug the drive in, the glamour starts to wear off. The mini-USB 3 socket, along with a small blue access light, is positioned at the same end as the text, so in everyday use the drive appears to face backwards.

Performance is rather disappointing too. Though far faster than a USB 2 drive, in most of our tests the Nobility failed to keep up with other portable USB 3 drives. In our small file read test it averaged just 39MB/sec, 25% behind the 640GB Buffalo MiniStation Lite.

It was a similar story with our large file tests: with read and write rates of 72MB/sec and 67MB/sec respectively, this is one of the slowest USB 3 drives we’ve seen.

The one thing the Adata has going for it is price. Portable drives are always pricey, but at 13.1p per gigabyte this one’s the cheapest of the portable drives in this Labs. You get no interesting accessories though, and when you can get the tasteful Iomega eGo Portable for just £2 more it’s hard to recommend the Nobility NH01.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith