The Transcend Information, Inc. is a multinational high technology company that has its headquarters based on Taiwan. Their product portfolio includes over 2000 devices that include memory and storage devices, portable media players and multimedia products. It is the first ever Taiwan to get an ISO 9001 certification and also the first ever to have offered a lifetime warranty on all its memory modules. The following review is on, the Transcend StoreJet 25M Mobile hard drive which bears US Army’s seal of approval.

Simple and sleek design:

Design wise, the Transcend StoreJet 25M does not have the elegant styling of the Western Digital My Passport series, but has kept things very simple and intuitive in its 2.5″ form factor. In size, the device is just a little taller than the iPhone, and has its dimensions as, (H x Wx D) 134 x 80.8 x 18.8mm and weighs just 206 grams. Though the actual casing is made out of plastic, most of its body has been covered with a replaceable rubber skin in order to prevent scratching or any kind of damage for the actual casing. You will be able to find just a USB 2.0 connection and a one touch back up button. The blue circle around the one touch button is quite attractive.

Interface:

To make sure you have utmost compatibility with most of the computers, the drives uses a high speed USB2.0 interface that offers data transfer rates of up to 480Mbps. This interface also offers the handiness of plug and play.

Built to meet US Military Drop Test Standards:

The Transcend StoreJet 25M external hard drive is allegedly built to meet the U.S Military Drop Test Standards. One of the major differences between the StoreJet 25M and the other commercial portable hard drives is that, this drive is enclosed in a shockproof casing. This model is a piece of new hybrid called the ‘ruggedized’ portable drives. This hard drive is designed to take more than a couple of harsh knocks without losing the data on the internal hard drive. With its advanced 2 stage anti-shock technology, it is literally one of the safest device to keep your data.

Capacities available:

The Transcend StoreJet 25M is available in capacities such as 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB.

Compatibility:

The drive is compatible with all the commonly used OSs like Windows 2000 / XP / Vista, Mac OS 9.0, or later and Linux Kernel 2.4.2, or later.

Installation:

Installation of the drive is very simple. Just plug it to your system via its USB2.0 port. The drive gets powered up promptly and your OS would prompt you the free space that the drive has got. And as the drive has been formatted as FAT 32, it works on both Mac and Windows. But please note that, if you are using big files and Mac only, it is better that you reformat the drive as HFS+.

Rugged tests for the rugged drive:

Usually when we get product models to be reviewed, we try to be as gentle as possible as not to damage them. But as far as the StoreJet 25M is concerned, it has its product features stating rugged things like run over by car, etc, we thought we better test it to provide the best to our visitors. And as expected the Transcend’s  miracle passed with flying colours.

Basic features and Data Tranfer Speeds:

StoreJet 25M comes with a 2.5” SATA hard disk drive with a spindle speed of 5400rpm and cache of 8MB. Having most of the attention on maintaining the ruggedness of the drive, Transcend has not disappointed us with the transfer speeds. In fact, it is one of the fastest drives in the current market. The StoreJet 25M external HDD manages to have a write speed of 24.3 megabytes per second and read speed of 28.5 megabytes per second. And when we tried to copy a set of files from one area of the drive into another, the speed was about 12Mbps. The blue LED light indicates the ongoing transfers. The speed is in par with the Verbatim SmartDisk that we reviewed recently.

But one of the common facts that we had noticed with most of the other external hard drives is true in the case of Transcend StoreJet 25M too. That is, the larger the size of data, faster is the rate of transfer and lower the data, the speed reduces considerably, bit the slower rates are reasonable too. When transferring smaller files, the StoreJet 25M has a write speed of 15.3Mbps and read speed of 23.8Mbps and the process of copying takes 7.2Mbps. Though these rates are considerably less than the previous rates with larger files, these rates are still faster than that of the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus.

The limited use of StoreJet Elite software:

Transcend has offered its own formatting utility with the StoreJet 25M. This utility is not of much use as it does not do anything additional than what is already available in Windows. The StoreJet Elite allows you to configure the physical One Touch backup button, provides backup settings which allows you to store some personal user information like e-mail accounts, browser bookmarks and even the user specific My Documents folder of your PC. There are some hardly used features too included in the software, such as the ZIP file encryption and also private browsing shortcuts for FireFox and Internet Explorer. It would have been better if Transcend had compartmentalised the software in order to suite these specific needs rather than giving a bloated all in one solution.

Miser warranty:

Transcend offers just 2 years warranty for its StoreJet 25M which is quite disappointing as most of its rivals are offered a minimum for five years warranty by their respective manufacturers.

Verdict:

We must appreciate the toughness of Transcend StoreJet 25M. It is a perfect external hard drive too when you consider its USB speed, even though a quicker FireWire Interface would have made it impeccable. The absence of styled and polished software like most of its rivals is a bit disappointing. But if you fancy the durability of the hard drive, then StoreJet 25M is the best choice for you. Though this kind of durability comes at a little premium cost, this drive is well worth it.

Transcend StoreJet 25M Mobile Hard Drive - Technical Specifications, Features

Manufacturer Transcend
Model Name StoreJet 25M Mobile hard drive
Colours available Red and orange
Dimensions (H x W x D) 134 x 80.8 x 18.8mm
Weight 206 grams
Form factor 2.5″
Available Capacities 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and 500GB
Buffer size 8MB
Hard disk type SATA
Data transfer rate (max) 480 Mbit/s
Compatible operating systems Windows 2000 / XP / Vista, Mac OS 9.0, or later and
Linux Kernel 2.4.2, or later
Software StoreJet Elite
Certification CE, FCC, BSMI, US MIL-STD-810F
Output Voltage USB DC 5V
Warranty Two years

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