ADATA HD710A 1TB External HDD For Mac Review – Waterproof and Shockproof

ADATA is reaching out to us storage geeks who always find a way to break things.  They have introduced their newest HD710 as a high capacity storage device that is military grade shock proof, waterproof up to 1.5 metres for 60 minutes, as well as being dust proof. No, it is not an SSD but the HD710 (or HD710A for Macs in our case) does provide some great protection at a decent capacity for those who need it, and at a great price point as well.

A bit off looking and somewhat Star Wars driven, the HD710 is available in the color shown here for Macs, or yellow, blue or black for PC’s.  The exterior is or plastic and a soft rubber, with a microUSB cable that attaches nicely around the exterior of the device.

As much as we might not like the ends of the cable exposed, previous iterations of external drives with integrated USB cables never quite seemed to work as well.

Another unique feature about the ADATA 710 series external hard drives is the fact that they are UASP compatible which breaks through the typical USB performance barrier.  We tested our sample on our MacBook Air, finding that it was recognized immediately, and these test results were returned:

Just as a bit of a confirmation, we thought we might test the HD710A with Quickbench as well:

Considering this is a hard drive, and available in capacities of one or two terabytes, read and write performance above 100MB/s is very good.  Our sample HD710A was the ‘for Mac’ version so we decided to reformat the hard drive for the PC to see how performance fared there:

As you can see, performance is solid on Crystal DiskMark, even though the low 4k write transfer speeds remain very evident in hard drives, unlike the SSD.  Even being an ‘all flash’ SSD kind of guy, I have to admit that there are still those that prefer, and trust, hard drives for back up and long term storage.

This is where the ADATA 710 family fares well, and with its low price of $65 for the 500GB capacity, $70 for the 1TB and $135 for the 2TB, coupled with its 3 year warranty, this is a hard drive definitely worthy of consideration.

Check Out Pricing of the ADATA HD710 Family at Amazon