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Today’s market is flooded with USB2.0 external hard drive cases, they’re available for as little
as AU$17.00 when using a 2.5” Laptop Hard Drive, so what makes the QNAP QBACK-25 so special and worth AU$78.00 when it looks like every other product on the market. Well let’s find out.
As stated, the QBACK looks similar to every other external drive case on the market, except this one actually looks decent. It has a grey anodized aluminium cover over a glossy black plastic surround, giving it a sleek, stylish appearance. It is minimalistic in its coverings with only the product name written neatly on the top and front, no ugly graphics and no LEDs so bright that they’ll blind someone at 50 paces.
Assembly:
Assembly is extremely simple, the QBACK comes with step-by-step instructions written in a format that is unknown to the IT community – it actually makes sense. They also come complete with pictures so you just can’t go wrong.
The hard drive itself requires no screws, it has 4 shockpads, one for each corner of the drive.
We simply install one at each corner, plug the circuit board into the drive,
and slide the whole assembly into the case,
screw the cover on with the supplied screwdriver, and we’re all set, ready to go.
Installation:
When we plug the QBACK into our laptop it is automatically detected by windows and ready to use. We didn’t do the usual next step of going to disk management and creating a partition, because this drive comes with its own software, so we’ll let that do all the work instead. Now, yes this drive can be used like a normal external drive without the software, but this drive’s worth $80, not $20, and there’s a good reason for that, the software included takes the QBACK from a simple drive case and turns it into a one-touch simple backup solution with the security of AES 256-Bit Data Encryption. Now things are starting to get interesting.
The Software:
With the drive plugged in, we go about installing the QNAP software, a very simple process with no real configuration options to speak of to complicate the process, at least during the initial install anyway. After the install the software asks how we would like our drive partitioned, one partition for public use that anyone can access, and one for private use that is encrypted and password protected. We are using a 40GB Samsung 2.5” IDE Laptop Drive, (Model MP0402H) and so split it 50/50 for 2 x 20GB partitions.
The drive is now fully installed and both drives (private and public) are viewable and accessable in My Computer. The QNAP software also made a copy of its install program in the public partition, so when you take the drive to another PC, it is easy to install the software so you can get access to the encrypted partition (provided you remember your password of course), we thought this was a thoughtful inclusion.
The main purpose of the software is to configure your backups, there are 3 options:
· Automatic Backup – This backup will be performed whenever the drive is plugged into your machine. Also any time data is changed at the source, it will be automatically updated on the backup drive. Quite useful if you’re the forgetful type and forget to do your backup, this will have already done it for you.
· Scheduled Backup – Perform a backup at a certain time, every day, week or month.
· Instant Backup – Once you configure this, a backup will be performed whenever you press the ‘instant backup’ button on the drive itself.
All backups are incremental, meaning it will only copy new files or overwrite files that have changed, this makes backups very fast once the initial backup is completed. You can choose to store your backups on either the public or private partition, the public partition is faster as the data does not need to be encrypted, but the private partition is the obvious choice for any sensitive data you want to hide from prying eyes.
Performance:
The performance of the drive and case are just as good as any other product on the market when using the public drive, but performance suffers when using the private drive due to the data encryption required. It is a software encryption and I’m running it on a PM-750 1.86Ghz Laptop and performance is still more than adequate, but a faster processor would help greatly I imagine.
Below are a couple of performance benchmarks, the first is a SiSoft Sandra Physical Disk performance benchmark, measuring drive speed and average seek times, and comparing the QBACK to the same hard drive in a cheaper, generic USB2.0 Case.
As you can see, performance difference is almost nil.
This next benchmark demonstrates the difference in speed when reading and writing to the public drive and reading and writing to the private, encrypted drive. SiSoft Sandra wasn’t able to access the encrypted drive to perform a benchmark on it, so these are hand timed with a 2.8GB ISO file. The final result is the averages of 3 successful copies.
This graph clearly demonstrates a large performance difference when using data encryption. This is more or less to be expected, and as I mentioned before, a computer with greater processing power would likely see the two results come closer together. This is the price you pay for secure data, but even at 7minutes:11seconds to copy 2.8GB of data, it’s still working at 6.5MB/sec which is still very useable, but well down from the performance of the public drive at 25MB/s.
Conclusion:
Pros:
· Well made, good looking unit.
· Easy to assemble and install.
· Ability to secure your data.
· Easy to use backup software included, with ‘One-Touch’ Backup option.
Cons:
· Performance suffers when using data encryption
If you’re looking for a small, portable, easy to use backup solution, the QBACK-25 would be ideal when coupled with a well sized 2.5” Notebook drive. It costs more than your typical external drive case, but the features are more than worth it.
Rating: 8.5/10
This drive can be pruchased online at www.techbuy.com.au
