Plextor PX-PH500U3 USB 3.0 Portable Hard Disk Drive Review

Storage/HDD by stefan @ 2011-11-07

The PX-PH500U3 USB 3.0 HDD from Plextor comes with a lightweight casing and sports a professional, clean design. The performance is good for a 500GB 5400RPM drive and for added value we get three separate applications already preloaded on the HDD; the applications are full versions, with the serial numbers supplied in the box.

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Test Setup and Extra Info

The testbench was composed from the following hardware:

 

CPU: Intel I7 Retail @ stock

Motherboard: Foxconn BloodRage with G42 BIOS

RAM: 3x2GB Patriot PVT36G1600LLK 1600MHz

Video: Sparkle GTX 470 with stock and OMNI A.L.C.

Power Supply: Nexus RX-8500 850W modular

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11

Case: Thermaltake Armor+ LCS, stock cooling

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Expansion: ASUS U3S6

 

After plugging in the drive in a spare USB 3.0 port, we can find out that the product comes with some preloaded software kits:

 

 

The HDD comes formatted NTFS and here is the total reported free space:

 

 

Inside the enclosure, we can find a Toshiba MK5059GSXP 2.5'' 5400RPM HDD with 8MB cache:

 

 

After executing the Autorun function from the drive, we can see the included software functions, so we can decide which ones we need to install (speed up, backup or drive encryption):

 

 

 

The TurboHDD USB application looks the same to the one we have seen on some previous reviews of motherboards or USB flash drives, and, of course, it comes with the same installer:

 

 

 

To be able to activate the application, we need to use the serial found inside the box:

 

 

 

After the application will be started, it will ask us to remove and plug the disk again:

 

 

 

The main interface allows us to switch between Normal and Turbo transfer modes:

 

 

 

Another application that is included is named PCClone EX Lite and helps us make backups of the important data:

 

 

 

The PCClone EX Lite application interface is split into multiple tabs; inside the Quick Launch menu we can initiate the automatic backup function, only by clicking the button:

 

 

 

The next menu lets us specify which drives and folders to include for backup to the external USB device:

 

 

 

The File Manager is a Windows Explorer clone so we can move data from one place to another:

 

 

 

In the last tab we can access the advanced settings of the application:

 

 

 

The Plextor drive is also supplied with the SecureDriveEX application, which allows us to password protect the data found on the disk.

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