Review: ADATA Classic CH94 (320GB)

Design
Instead of being big and black, the ADATA Classic CH94 is stylish and portable - very much resembling a wallet or purse with its matte black plastic exterior and glossy black outlining its edges. It's small and light, being able to fit into your hand and easily carried around in your pocket. The small USB cable actually tucks into the side so you just take this out when you need it. It gives you that extra space you need without the need for power cables - though it does give off a cool blue LED light when it's connected to a computer and that flashes accordingly if you are using the files or doing a file transfer. The package also comes with some character stickers (you know the alphabet song) that you can use to tag your drive too.

Price

It comes with a 3 year warranty and only costs around 28 cents per gigabyte (if you buy it at Mighty Ape, that is) which is quite good.

Format

The drive comes formatted as a FAT32 which makes it compatible with both Windows and Mac computers but if you want to transfer or back-up files that are greater than 4GB you'll have to format it to NTFS.

Side Tangent

Windows can read and write to NTFS drives no problem but Mac seems to have a problem with writing onto NTFS drives rather than reading them. There is of course a workaround - just download MacFUSE along with NTFS-3G so you can read and write as you like to NTFS from your Mac as you like. Remember though that this is only a 15-day trial for NTFS-3G, but to this day (only been a couple though), I've used it with no problems. 

UPDATE: Okay, so my licensed for Tuxera expired awhile ago but you know what? I'm still able to use my portable hard drive when I connect it to the USB port on my wireless router as a device - I can drag and drop files onto it even though it's formatted to NTFS. How so? The router just recognizes it as a device and doesn't really care about the format. So two thumbs up. It's all good. 

Verdict

This a great little drive for those on the go - who want to transfer files here and there and perhaps those who need a little more storage than what their average hard drive yields. Definitely recommended, with a variety of disk sizes and colors to suit your needs and lifestyle.