Memorex Ultra Travel Drive

By: Staff
Mon, March 10, 2008 - 3:15:00
0 comments

Memorex sent me one of their Ultra Travel Drives. Apparently, after everybody else had a shot at these disks with replaceable “armour” I was the one who was going to write a swell review of their Ultra Travel Drive. In a world where disk drives have been become a commodity if ever there was one, the Memorex drive tries to discern itself from the others by offering coloured “shells” that you can replace yourself.

“Great Stuff!” “What a fantastic idea!” Those are the exclamation marks Memorex marketing people seem to have been thinking of when they designed these drives. Alas, reviewers and potential users with some knowledge of technology tend to be a lot more subdued in their commentaries, especially when the rest of the drive is only average --mediocre so to speak.

Yes, you can replace the the back and front shell, and yes there’s a rubberised edge for robustness. Robust what? The drive inside? Drop the rubberised thing from a couple of metres and we’ll see how well that bumper material protected the mechanism inside. Apart from this snake oil level marketing, the Memorex Ultra Travel Drive needs power --loads of it. It’s only a USB 2.0 drive, but it has both a USB cable for power only and a USB data cable.

If you thought you needed the power cable only when travelling and using the drive with a laptop, forget it. Even when the thing is connected to a fully powered brand new Belkin USB hub, it won’t work without the extra power. Oh, and there is a backup program delivered with the drive, one that you can start by using a button on the drive. Isn’t that great? It would be if the backup program was any good. It might be --on Windows. and so, there you are, with a lacklustre erforming drive that you can backup to snail-wise --at 8MB per second.

Next time Memorex launches a new drive, I’ll pass on reviewing it.