Verbatim Store 'n' Go SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (500GB)

Editors'
Rating

7.4 10
 
Pros
Low cost for capacity and USB 3.0 speed; backup software included; long warranty
 
Cons
Slow compared with other USB 3.0 drives we’ve tested; exterior attracts fingerprints
 
Editors' Take
Some competing drives are faster and have more features, but if you’re looking for an low-cost, compact drive with serious backup software, the Store ‘n’ Go SuperSpeed won’t disappoint.    
 
 
CompUSA
$93.99
 
$84.99 from CDW Corporation
$73.78 from PC Connection Express
 
Amazon.com
$69.33
 
$99.99 from Staples
 
 
See all prices $68.25>> 

 
Key Specs
Capacity: 500GB
Interface: USB 3.0
Spin Rate: 5,400rpm
Dimensions (HWD): 4.7x3.1x0.7 inches
Weight: 10.7 ounces
 

 
Verbatim Store 'n' Go SuperSpeed USB 3.0 (500GB) Review
Reviewed by: Matt Safford
Review Date: July 2011 

It’s hard to stand out in the saturated market for portable hard drives, especially now that speedy USB 3.0 drives have become commonplace. (These drives, when used with a matching interface port, offer much faster file transfers than traditional USB 2.0.) Seagate made a play to set itself apart in the USB 3.0 arena by going extremely thin with its GoFlex Slim, and Iomega piqued our interest with its USB 3.0 eGo, a 1TB drive that turned out to be the speediest portable hard drive we’ve seen yet in our tests.

The next USB 3.0 drive to land on our lab bench was Verbatim’s Store 'n' Go SuperSpeed, sporting a 500GB capacity at a reasonable cost per gigabyte. (Verbatim also offers 750GB and 1TB versions.) When we wrote this in mid-July 2011, the 500GB model we tested was available online for about $70. In contrast, Iomega’s same-capacity version of its eGo drive, which was faster in our testing, cost about $10 less.

Still, despite it not quite living up to its "SuperSpeed" billing, the Verbatim drive could be a solid value if you need good backup software, thanks to the bundled Nero BackItUp & Burn program. It also comes with a lengthy seven-year warranty, which sets it apart from the pack.

Design & Features
The Store 'n' Go SuperSpeed’s glossy black-plastic shell isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the GoFlex Slim’s aluminum enclosure. (It's also available in blue and pink.) At 0.7 inch thick at its thickest point, and under 5 inches long with a tapered top, the drive is quite compact and slips into most any pocket, provided you aren’t a fan of skinny jeans. 

As we said above, the Store ‘n’ Go drive comes with Nero’s BackItUp & Burn software, a backup utility that we liked for its advanced features when we saw it in our review of Nero Multimedia Suite 10. Considering Nero sells the software for $39.99 on its site, the inclusion of the software here is a big plus, provided you’re buying the drive for rigorous backup purposes, not to just to drag and drop files between computers.
 
If you do use multiple computers, particularly a jumble of PCs and Macs, the Seagate GoFlex drives might be a smarter choice, as they include Paragon Software Group’s NTFS for Mac. NTFS for Mac is a $20 piece of software that lets those drives play nice with a mixture of Macs and PCs. Without it or some other software solution, Macs can read from a PC-formatted drive, but they can’t write to one. (You could, of course, purchase and run Paragon’s software with the Verbatim drive on your own, but that would add to the cost of the drive.)

The Store 'n' Go drive also lacks Seagate’s GoFlex cable connectors, which allow you to update your drive with different interface options down the line. If, say, you get an office PC with FireWire 800, eSATA, or some future option like the (for now, Mac-centric) Thunderbolt, you won't be locked out of using that interface. With Verbatim’s drive, you’re "stuck" with just USB 3.0 and USB 2.0. We don't consider that a major minus, since we don't see either USB interface going away anytime soon, and USB 3.0 only becoming more common. We merely point out that the GoFlex drives offer a bit more connection versatility if you'll use your drive across a bunch of different computers.

For most folks, the Store 'n' Go’s greatest selling point is its seven-year warranty. Competing companies like Seagate and Iomega only offer three-year warranties on their drives. If you plan to use the drive for several years to come, this is a major point in its favor. That said, as we said in our Seagate GoFlex Slim review, with a product like a portable hard drive, the data you could lose in a drive failure is often more valuable than the drive itself. While a warranty will get your drive repaired or replaced, it won't get your data back. And five or seven years down the line, getting your drive fixed for free isn't likely to be a major concern when a drive with similar speed and capacity will cost much less, thanks to advancements in technology.

Performance
To test the Store 'n' Go, we used our standard 10GB test folder, which contains a mixture of media files. We tested the write speed (the time it takes to copy the test folder to the drive) and the read speed (how long it takes to copy it back to the host computer). We ran these tests over both the USB 3.0 interface and the older USB 2.0 interface, in both cases on an MSI E350IA-E45 motherboard with USB 3.0 support. We used an OCZ Onyx solid-state drive (SSD) as the source and destination drive to make sure the desktop drive was not acting as a bottleneck in testing.

As we said earlier, the Store 'n' Go’s performance, while certainly not slow by old USB 2.0 standards, did lag behind the pack of recent USB 3.0 drives we’ve tested. Iomega's 1TB eGo is our current portable-drive champ, and so set the speed benchmark here, writing our 10GB test folder over USB 3.0 in 3 minutes and 13 seconds, and reading the same folder back to the desktop in 2:19. The Seagate GoFlex Slim was a bit slower, taking 3:55 to write the same test folder, and 3:18 to read it back. And Verbatim’s Store 'n'  Go SuperSpeed, despite its name, was slower than both of them. It took nearly a minute longer than the Seagate GoFlex to write our test folder (4:49) and over a minute longer to read it back to the desktop (4:13).

The speeds we saw under USB 2.0 were much lower than the 3.0 numbers, as expected. All three drives wrote our test folder in under 7 minutes, with the eGo again coming in first, but the Store ‘n’ Go drive slid in just 20 seconds behind, taking 6:19. The eGo came in first in read speeds, taking 7:33 on our read test; the GoFlex Slim took exactly a minute longer, while the Verbatim landed last, taking nearly 11 minutes to read the same folder.

The Verbatim drive is certainly no speedster, but for most users, we wouldn't over-emphasize the performance differences here. Unless you frequently use your drive to copy dozens of gigabytes of data back and forth (rather than just accessing the data directly from the drive), you won't notice much performance difference among these three drives in most everyday use.

Still, if you're stepping up to a USB 3.0 drive, USB 3.0's better transfer speeds might the very reason you're upgrading. If so, the Store ‘n’ Go probably shouldn’t be near the top of your list.

Conclusion
The Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go fails to live up to its SuperSpeed promise, at least compared with competing USB 3.0 drives. And we did spend a lot of time here talking up features available from competitors that the Store ‘n’ Go lacks. That said, there’s nothing inherently flawed with this drive.

If you put stock in the longer warranty and are looking for a drive with some substantive backup software, it’s a solid choice. But if speed or upgradability to other interfaces are more important to you, the speedier eGo drive or the interface-swapping Seagate GoFlex are better picks, and available for about the same price.

Price (at time of review): $75 (mfr. est.)