I
n some alternate world, Fabrik’s Sim-
pleTech Redrive is winning a Kick Ass
award from Green PC—Maximum PC’s
eco-conscious sister publication. This is the
most environmentally friendly external
storage device we’ve ever tested. From its
packaging, to its construction, to its guts, the
Redrive is designed with a single purpose in
mind: saving the planet. As a byproduct of
this, the drive saves you energy and, conse-
quently, money.
Saving energy generally doesn’t lead to
superior speeds in the storage world. And it
wouldn’t with the Redrive either if the drive
had connection options other than USB. Over
an eSATA connection, for example, its inter-
nal 500GB Western Digital Caviar Green drive
would perform far more slowly than a major-
ity of the external devices we’ve tested. This
is because the Caviar Green drive modulates
between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, sacrifi cingperformance for energy savings when com-
pared to the standard 7,200rpm hard drives
used by most external storage products.
Since the Redrive is constrained to the
pipeline of a USB connection, the Caviar
Green’s overall speed is of less relevance.
In fact, the Redrive ends up beating every
other USB external device we’ve tested in
our synthetic benchmarks. The catch is that
you won’t notice any real-world diff erence,
given that it beats the speeds of similar USB
external drives by less than fi ve percent.
However, the Redrive also comes bundled
with the same TurboUSB technology that’s
included with Buff alo’s external storage of-
ferings. This proprietary application allows
the drive to shoot past the traditional 37MB/s
speed cap we’ve experienced with all other
external USB drives.
Unlike Buff alo’s DriveStation Combo 4,
the Redrive has a slight issue with its Tur-boUSB functionality. The soft ware pushes
the Redrive’s average write speeds 20
percent faster than normal, and faster than
any USB-based drive we’ve tested, but it
fails to increase the drive’s read speeds.
This isn’t the case with the DriveStation
Combo 4, which enjoys speed increases of
approximately 20 percent on both its reads
and writes when compared to standard
USB speeds. The consequence of this is
that the DriveStation Combo 4 edges out
the Redrive in our real-world benchmark,
PCMark05, by 2 percent.
A simple scheduled-backup application
rounds out the Redrive’s feature set. While
the discrepancies between the device’s
TurboUSB read and write speeds are a slight
ding, there is nothing else about the Redrive
that makes us sour. In this case, green is
golden. –D A V E M U R P H YSimpleTech
Redrive
What’s next, hard drives
made from twigs?
The Redrive’s shell is constructed of
bamboo and recycled aluminum. The
latter doubles as a handy heatsink for
the hard drive itself.IN THE LAB^
REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE86 | MAXIMUMPC | NOV 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Best scores are bolded. HD Tach version 3.0.1.0 used.BENCHMARKS
Redrive (USB) Redrive (TurboUSB) DriveStation Combo4 (USB) DriveStationCombo4 (TurboUSB)
HD Tach Burst (MB/s)
HD Tach Rdm. Access (ms)
HD Tach Avg. Read (MB/s)
HD Tach Avg. Write (MB/s)
PCMark05 Overall35.1 40.6 36.2 WNR
14.8 14.9 16.4 16.4
34.9 34.9 33.9 41.7
34.9 43.8 34.2 41.1
3,468 3,757 3,698 3,833VERDICT$150, http://www.simpletech.com8
POLAR BEAR FLYING SQUIRREL
Saves energy; speedy
TurboUSB perfor-
mance.Only write speeds
are improved by
TurboUSB.SIMPLETECH REDRIVE