Netbook Network

Netbooks are small and cheap, and don’t exactly come with gigantic hard drives. Standard netbooks usually come with 160 GB of storage, and newer, higher end netbooks generally come with 250 GB of storage. For some users this may be enough, for others, you’ll want a lot more. My older netbook only had 160 GB of storage, and I needed a place to back up my files. Unfortunately, the only external hard drive I had laying around at the time was 80 GB, just enough for one backup. So I got myself a larger external hard drive – you guessed it, a Verbatim CLON Portable Hard Drive at 250 GB of storage. It was relatively cheap at $50 for an external hard drive with 250 GB, which are usually around $70. It may be cheap, but is it reliable? Read the full review to find out.

The device itself has a rather nice feel to it. It’s got a matte finish and weighs a little more than my Zune HD (2.6 ounces). On top, a blue light can be found at the corner of the device, signaling if the drive is active or not. It’s curved on the top and measures about 4.5″ x 3″ x 0.625″. It’s relatively small and can probably fit in your pocket. The hard drive has a very solid feel to it, and doesn’t make any noises when I try to bend it around.

On the side, you’re given a mini-USB port. The hard drive comes with a mini-USB to USB cable that’s a little more than a foot long, so you don’t need to grab an extra cable to use it.

Underneath, there are four rubber pads that prevent the drive from slipping around. The rubber pads work surprisingly well, holding on to the surface of my table when pushed around. However, I noticed dust collects on the pads after some time and you’ll have to rub the dust off.

Now, the drive itself comes with some backup software, but I deleted the contents because it was trialware and I had no intention of buying backup software when Windows 7′s backup utility is good enough.

The device is formatted to the NTFS filesystem – primarily used by Windows. It can be a hit or miss for some – most netbooks have Windows preinstalled, and most Linux distributions will recognize NTFS – but if you’re a Mac user, you might be out of luck without special tools to reformat the drive. As you can see, the drive holds 25,000,000,000 bytes – the equivalent of 250 GB, but I’m betting some storage was used up for other information, giving you only 232 GB of usable space. It’s alright, considering all hard drives or flash drives don’t have a perfect amount of usable memory, but some users may be irked by the missing 18 GB.

Time to run a speed test. I used the USB cable provided and plugged into a USB2.0 port on my computer.

Well, it looks like the drive has a read and write speed of about 30 MB/s. If you check out the external hard drive speed chart from Tom’s Hardware for external hard drives under $100, you’ll find that 30 MB/s is a bit on the lower end of the scale. However, as a low-end $50 external hard drive, it falls in line with most of the external hard drives on the chart.

Well, we’ve gone through everything from outward appearance to performance of the external hard drive itself. Time to wrap up this review.

Conclusion:
Verbatim’s CLON Portable Hard Drive is a very solid device, with a relatively cheap price. It even looks good on the outside, and performance is within the range of lower-end external hard drives. However, some users may be irked by the amount of useable storage space, and some users may find the drive a bit too slow. Overall, Verbatim’s CLON Portable Hard Drive line is an affordable yet reliable storage solution.

Pros:
-Small, good build, looks nice
-Rubber pads prevent device from slipping
-Comes with USB cable
-30 MB/s transfer speed
-Only $50 for 250 GB of storage

Cons:
-Formatted to NTFS, may require users to reformat
-Comes with trialware
-Only 232 GB of usable space
-May be too slow for some users

The Verbatim CLON Portable Hard Drive has won our Silver Award. If you wish to purchase a Verbatim CLON Portable Hard Drive, check out the Google Shop page for options. The Verbatim CLON Portable Hard Drive generally sells around $50.