ADATA HD720 External Hard Disk (1TB) Review – Durability At Its Finest!

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our SSD’s slightly different depending upon the drive’s marketed purpose, that of a consumer or an enterprise focused SSD.  For a consumer SSD, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Benchmarks for our consumer tests are that of fresh drives, so that we can verify that the manufacturer’s specifications match the SSD. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your SSD is top-notch.

CHRIS SYSTEM JULY 2014

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

PC CHASSIS: Cooler Master CM Strom Stryker Chassis
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard 
CPU: Intel i7 3770K CPU
CPU COOLER: Corsair H100 CPU Cooler
POWER SUPPLY: be quiet! Dark power Pro 850W
SYSTEM COOLING: be quiet! Silent Wings 2 Chassis Fan
MEMORY: Crucial Ballistix Dual Channel DDR3 Memory
GRAPHICS CARD: Zotac GeForce GTX 970 Omega Core Edition

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software used for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, QuickBench and BlackMagic Speed Test.  In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO 6.2.1

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

ADATA HD720 Tests 4

As we can see above, the ADATA HD720 has a Toshiba Hard Disk Drive on the inside, with a 8192KB buffer size and rotation rate of 5400 RPM. The drive has previously been powered on 5 times, but for under an hour in time. We can also see that the drive features SMART, Advanced Power Management and Native Command Queuing.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

ADATA HD720 Tests 5

Our first benchmark test yields fairly decent results, as the HD720 pumps out a max read speed of up to 115 MB/s and a max write speed of up to 113 MB/s.

Today we are looking at the latest, ultra durable external hard disk drive available from ADATA, the HD720. A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to look at the HD710A, which had a little different purpose, mainly for targeting the Mac market. The HD720 is your solution to water, dust and shock. Keep reading to find out more! TERMINOLOGY AND STORAGE STANDARDS Much of the testing and terminology used throughout the remainder of this article is focused on storage devices, and how they perform when put under different situations. If you are looking to learn more about storage, mainly flash storage, then…

Review Overview

Product Build
Components
Specifications
Pricing and Availability
Warranty

Durable!

The ADATA HD720 External Hard Disk Drive is one of the most durable external storage solution we have seen to date. Well deserving of our Gold Seal of Approval!

User Rating: 2.52 ( 72 votes)

One comment

  1. I have achieved an ADATA HD 720-1T USB disk. I use it with an ASUS laptop as an external bootable disk for Linux (I have windows 8.1 installed on my SSD laptop drive). On the ADATA drive I have 3 different Linux distros installed. It work just fine (thanks to USB 3.0). Great product..

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