AcomData PureDrive 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive PDHD1000UFSE

5 comments

1. 

   CoffeeFan on October 9, 2009 at 9:13 pm

   I have bought many of these drives – probably 20 or so over the last 18 months, mostly the USB/eSATA variant but some Firewire as well. I don’t understand the highly negative reviews. As I see it this is as good as most any major alternative whilst being compact and easily stacked. Under sometimes very intensive usage I have had only one actual failure which was for a substantial fall whilst operating which I would not have expected any drive to survive. I simply opened up the case with that failed drive and reused it with a new OEM disk. These kinds of add-on drive are now a generic product, purchased on price primarily and style to some extent. This particular drive is in my experience perfectly reliable and when the price dips from time to time (as it does) I buy more. My primary concern with it is the lack of a 2Tb version and ideally Firewire 800. The Firewire version is slightly longer than the USB/eSATA version but stacks with it fine. I see no particular problems with this product in my fairly extensive experience of it and of its competition.

2. 

   Seraph8421 on October 9, 2009 at 11:24 pm

   The drive took four months to fail sitting on my desk, but it did. Fortunately I had everything backed up. As several of the other negative reviews have mentioned, ACOMDATA’s tech support should be timed with a calendar. E-mail and phone go unanswered. I haven’t tried semaphore yet, but I’m wondering. I’m truly glad for the folks who’ve gotten good drives; but if you should choose to purchase one of these, understand that there will be little to no help from the company should you get a bad one.

   If I had it to do over again, I’d do something else.

3. 

   J. L. Manning III on October 10, 2009 at 2:08 am

   I bought 2 of these and I should have bought four so I can run a 2TB raid. I will eventually get 2 more. I couldn’t find a better deal on a 1TB portable drive that gave you Firewire and USB 2 options. Lets not forget eSata. So these were great!

4. 

   M. Knowles on October 10, 2009 at 3:17 am

   I bought two of these hoping to use them for a RAID. As I was copying data over to the raid after setting it up I experienced write errors, first on one of them, then on the second. I decided to break apart the raid and reformat them hoping that would solve the problem. The second one hung during the reformat, and after that it was totally unusable. I tried copying data back to the first one and it was terribly slow. A folder that took 1 minute and 24 seconds to copy to my internal drive took 6 minutes and 35 seconds to copy to the Acomdata drive. At that point I knew I was going to return both drives. So I tried zeroing out the drive. Apple’s Disk Utility program estimated it would take 5 hours to do this. After five hours it wasn’t even half way through the process, and after 7 hours I went to bed leaving it running. This morning I checked it and the process failed due to a drive error. Based on my experience with these two and the previous reviewer who had much the same experience, I would highly recommend staying away from this manufacturer. I also will be going back to a known supplier.

5. 

   Frances R. Johnson on October 10, 2009 at 5:25 am

   i boght the 1T drive and it failed the first day. I even tried to reformating it and nothing could get it to work. I sent and e-mail on their website two times for tech support and no reply. I count this as an expensive lesson to stick to a tried and true known brands and bought a working beautiful 1T drive from Apple. More $ but no headache and hours of frustration of dealing with a nonfunctioning product.