Review: SimpleTech Signature Mini Portable Drive

Storage with style

July 2008 By Greg Robinson

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Nothing says “SEXY” like an external hard drive. OK, that’s not entirely true. One could probably make the same claim when talking about Angelina Jolie, red sports cars or that Victoria and her wonderful secret. Apparently the folks at SimpleTech feel the same way. Although their new portable drives come packaged with neither lingerie nor Ms. Jolie’s phone number, the sports car is closer than you might think – sort of. Sculpted by Pininfarina, the Italian design company responsible for the gorgeous lines of Ferrari automobiles, the Signature Mini is probably the sleekest portable hard drive you’ll ever encounter.

SimpleTech was kind enough to send me a 320GB model for evaluation and the results were very positive. Connection to your PC is made using a supplied USB 2.0 cable and it has a two-pronged end on the PC side. If additional power is required – from a laptop running on battery for example – you may need to connect using two USB ports. I needed just one port on my Dell PC and the drive was instantly recognized and available within Vista.

The Signature Mini comes formatted for use with Windows but it can also be formatted for use on a Mac. Additionally, you can format it (from a Mac) for use on both PCs and Macs. The latter results in a FAT32 partition so you’ll have to adhere to Windows naming conventions and you’ll need to make sure that no one file you’re copying is greater than 4GB. Once again, these limitations only apply if you format the drive for use on both a Mac and a PC.

Beyond the simple drag and drop and copy/paste functionality available with any hard drive, SimpleTech also includes ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Backup & Record software. The software is pretty straightforward to install and use and allows for scheduled, custom-defined data backups. I created an “incremental” backup to run daily at 4am on my “Documents” folder and it worked great. Also included is 2GB of free space using Fabrik’s Web-based archiving service, “Fabrik Ultimate Backup.” I tested this too and it worked precisely as advertised. Additional space costs $4.95/month.

With delicious names such as Espresso, Kiwi and Black Cherry, and capacities ranging from 120GB to 320GB, the Signature Mini injects a welcome dose of pizzazz to a traditionally boring product category. yy

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