Introduction

After we reviewed the first terabyte hard disks in our lab, it was only a matter of time before the first manufacturer sent us an external version of such a product. The one we did receive came to us not from the traditional harddisk brands, but our very own Philips had the scoop.

'Just plug in a terabyte': a few years ago it was only a dream, now it is finally within reach, even if Philips fudged the numbers a little: after formatting the total space available to Windows is 931 GB. More than enough for a huge amount of digital photos, films, music files and similar. Because Philips provided the drive not just with a USB connector but also with an eSATA interface, the added space can be accessed extremely fast. Even though eSATA isn't very common yet, this standard is vastly preferable over USB, as you can see from our test. Of course computers without eSATA support can still connect the drive using USB 2.0.

This Philips drive has two buttons: one to make a one touch backup, using the provided backup software, another to shut down the drive safely. Useful, as this way you can always be certain your valuable and increasingly huge amount of data is safe to transport. In that regard it's nice as well that the disk's enclosure is made from quality aluminium, so we can safely assume your files will be quite safe on it.

Performance

Anyone not yet convinced of eSATA's merits really should have a look at the performance scores. In PCMark05 the USB score is 3836, while with eSATA we see a result of 7240. Using the benchmark HDTune we see similar values: 68.3 MB/s over eSATA, only 27.7 MB/s while connected with USB. If you want to see detailed test results, just click one of the links at the bottom of the page. 

The scores clearly show eSATA is a system or mainboard feature one ought to take into consideration. Unsurprisingly, the hard disk we found in the Philips enclosure has been made by Hitachi, the first company to market a terabyte hard drive. By now Samsung and Seagate have announced disks with this capacity as well, which should see supplies increase and prices drop. For now the latter is a weak point of these drives, with a price of close to 500 euros this drive isn't exactly cheap. One should be able to buy three external 500 GB drive for this amount, with money to spare, too. Of course that solution wouldn't be quite as compact as one terabyte in a single smallish box. On a mitigating note, Philips does include Nero Backitup 2 Essentials for the price.

Conclusion

Philips delivers a huge virtual storage box with this external harddisk, which will hold until now impossibly large amounts of music, photos and video. Easy to carry around and thanks to the fast eSATA interface able to send and receive data at record speeds. It's just a shame the price is still a tad high. Recommended for those that can afford it.