Hitachi SimpleDrivell 2TB Turbo USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I own 2 Simple Drives. One is a very old 160GB usb drive and the other is a new 1TB usb drive. They both work great! I had 2 problems for which I needed tech support. I called the 800 number and got right through both times without any wait time.

The first problem was caused by me when I did a sector by sector backup of my hard drive, and the dell emergency backup partition became visible on my 1 TB usb drive. That partition is difficult to delete, but the support person was very helpful in getting it deleted. Unlike most, it was a very pleasant and pretty quick tech support call!

The second problem was a little more difficult. When attaching both usb drives at the same time, the 1TB drive showed up in "My Computer", but I could not transfer files to it. The support person had me try several different usb connections, checking of drive letters, and a few other things, but nothing worked. We both agreed that the problem was not the usb drive, but most likely an issue with my computer. He suggested I try attaching both to a different computer to confirm this, and call back if it still didn't work. I hung up, and attached both to a newer computer and they both worked perfectly. Issue resolved as far as I was concerned.

An hour later I get a call from tech support. HE has discussed my issue with an engineer, and they believe the problem is being caused because both drives have external power supplies and it could be overloading the usb controller. He suggested I unplug the power supply on one drive and see if that works. Then he asked if he could send me an email so I could respond to tell him if that worked.

I have been through many tech support nightmares. I have never before had such a pleasant tech support experience as this, and I wanted to share it with those that are considering this product.

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Product Description:
Hitachi HSD2000 SimpleDrive External Hard Drive - 2TB, USB 2.0

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Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDBAAU0020HBK-NESN Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I work for Computing support at Arizona State University, and I have enough technical knowledge to be certified as a TECH JUNKIE :).

I am a photographer too, so I have tons of Photos (about 160GB), Videos, Software, Movies and Documentaries. I was looking for a simple external hard drive without any backup software included, I am smart enough to do manual incremental backups with file tree structure intact (I use GOODSYNC to backup, its very simple and easy to use and free).

I have looked at many many external HDDs and narrowed down to two models "Samsung Story 1TB - very good one too" and this one (I wanted it to be cheap too - got this for $85 on [...]). I did not go with other WD models because of their annoying Backup Software.

Coming to the WD Elements 1TB: Its much smaller than I expected. It is dead silent, I had to touch it to convince myself that it was running, when I first turned it on. Its not too heavy either. The indicator light is placed at the rear, which is a very good thing (I find these LED's annoying, especially at night).

After I did the first setup, I copied 383GB of data (931GB was total space). It took about 4hr 47min, speed varied between 20MBps to 37MBps. This is pretty good speed for USB 2.0. It was just a bit warm (my old segate hard drive would be very very hot for this amount of data transfer).

I would recommend it to beginners or pros alike. I am very happy with this purchase!UPDATE:

After about three months of heavy usage, it never gave up on me. Its still dead silent and works flawlessly. It never got even warm!!

Follow these steps to get GOODSYNC for FREE:

In the beginning GOODSYNC was free, later they made a paid version as it gained popularity..

but there is a way to get PRO version for free...

1. go to good sync website
2. signup for a trial offer and you get PRO serial for free (I signed up for eMusic trial)
3. Once you get the serial, end the subscription before the trial expires...

NOTE: The above mentioned procedure may not work anymore:(

UPDATE: 07-28-2010

I sold my WD Elements 1TB and got a 2TB one a couple of months ago(as my data is on rise all the time), couldn't be happier :)
I bought it from TigerDirect for [ ... ] and got [ ... ] cashback via [ ... ] ...awesome!!

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Product Description:
2TB WD Elements USB 2.0 Ext desktop External Hard Drive

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Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S80 Document Imaging Scanner Review

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(More customer reviews)I purchased the GT-S80 to replace my 1st generation Mac compatible Scansnap (fi-5110EOXM). I wanted a faster scanner (40 PPM vs 15) with better paper handling (less misfeeds according to at least one review comparing GT-S50 to Scansnap elsewhere.)
I used the GT-S80 for less than a day and returned it to Amazon. Here are the reasons why:
1. Speed. Even though the GT-S80 is rated at 40 ppm, when I load paper to scan and push the scan button, it would take about 15-20 seconds for the Epson utility that handles the scanning to activate and for the scan job to actually begin. Several sheets would feed quickly, then there would be a pause (several seconds) while the 5 or 6 sheets that had fed were being processed. Please note, I am using a 2009 Mac Pro 8 core 2.66 GHz Nehalem Xeon machine with 16GB of RAM. It's not a sluggish machine. The combination of the delay in starting and the pause each 5-6 pages significantly decreased any speed advantage the GT-S80 may theoretically possess.
2. Page misfeeds. My scans often consist of regular laser paper interspersed with thinner "NCR" pressure sensitive paper. The GT-S80 double fed these as often as my old Scansnap. Not only did it misfeed, even when I tried to turn on the ultrasonic double feed detection, the Epson would not detect double fed sheets.
3. LCD display on scanner doesn't show actual scan settings when used with Macintosh. When used with Windows PC's, the Epson GT-S80 will show the scan settings from the LCD display (resolution, simplex/duplex, etc), allowing the user to choose the job setting desired. On Mac, only JOB1, JOB2, JOB3...etc. are shown.
4. Confusing EpsonScan utilities. I also have an Epson V600 flatbed scanner (great scanner!) The Epson Scan utility that is compatible with the V600 is a different version than the one that is compatible with the GT-S80, although they look similar. Neither will recognize the other scanner. This is a bit counter intuitive. Of course, this isn't a problem if you don't use Epson Scan to do your scanning (using TWAIN or another scan utility.)
Anyway, I ended up returning the scanner to Amazon and bought a Scansnap S1500M, which I am much happier with than the GT-S80.

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Product Description:
The WorkForce Pro GT-S80 offers businesses a powerful scanning solution, featuring speeds up to 80 ipm and a duty cycle of up to 1800 sheets.

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Visioneer Strobe 500 - Sheetfed scanner - Duplex - Legal - 600 dpi x 600 dpi - ADF ( 20 sheets ) - up to 500 scans per day - Hi-Speed USB Review

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(More customer reviews)First off, good points:
Build quality feel solid. The device firmly fits into the docking base and scans fast. As a recent Mac convert, I was looking for a full feature scanner for the Mac. I primarily intended to use the scanner to rapidly scan receipts and invoices. I purchased this unit because it claimed to produce searchable PDFs.

Now for the bad news...

First off, no drivers for Mac!!! No TWAIN or ISIS support. Only a third party product ExactScan Lite is bundled. The software seems good enough, but only the pro version produces searchable PDF's (OCR function). The lite version can only produce PDF, not tiff, jpeg or any other image format. The other bundled software, Presto! PageManager can do OCR but only on image formats. So you are a bit out of luck.

The manufacturer's website says:
Text Searchable PDF
If you can't search your scanned documents by their content, you might as well be looking at paper again. The Strobe 500 can scan automatically to searchable PDF. It preserves the integrity of the scanned page so that layout, signatures, logos, photos, etc., remain intact, but the text is OCR'd so that you can search the document by its content. This is very powerful when looking for a single document among hundreds or thousands.

But the undisclosed caveat is that you must be running windows to get the searchable PDF. I called support and after several explanations, they conceded that the scanner really cannot produce a searchable PDF on a Mac. I did look into the Pro version of ExactScan but it's another 100 euros to purchase and has significant issues with the de-skew and auto crop features. Overall for $400 a real disappointment. I just cant imagine a scanner vendor this day and age shipping a scanner out the door without drivers.

I guess I will be returning this unit. I have ordered the Epson scanner which ships with TWAIN drivers. Hopefully it will work better with Mac.

So if you are running Windows, I would not necessarily dismiss this scanner. I was able to get it working in a Windows XP Fusion VM, but for $400 that is no solution for me.

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Product Description:
The Strobe 500 offers the Flexibility to meet the needs of any job. It offers the features you demand in a powerful desktop scanner such as an 20-page Automatic Document Feeder, 30 images per minute duplex scanning speed, and Visioneer OneTouch with Kofax VRS technology.

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