ADATA SH93 Portable Hard Drive

Editor's Score
Features:	Performance:
Value:
The Verdict: Although the performance is average, the SH93 can certainly take a beating. This one is for the adventure lovers.

The A-DATA SH93 is one of those portable drives that you wont mind taking with you when you go off-loading. It can survive quite a bumps and some water. We received the 250GB version from A-DATA some time back that came nicely packaged in a Yellow box. Included with the hard drive was a wrap-around USB cable.

As labeled on the box, the drive works with Windows 7 and comes with a 60 day downloadable version of Norton Internet Security. Having said that, I had no issues connecting this drive to a Mac. It will work equally well with Windows XP or Vista as well . Also impressive, is the three year warranty that A-DATA provides with this drive which is about two years more than many other USB drives.

Looks wise, the SH93 is quite different than your average portable hard drive. The yellow and black rubber-plastic finish looks like its cut out from a tyre of a car. Its available in red as well in case yellow is not your colour. The selling point for the SH93 is that its the first shock proof and waterproof portable USB HDD.

I tested this by dropping the SH93 from a 1 meter table while it was plugged in and then submerged it in a bowl of water that is normally reserved for my wife’s culinary adventures. I’m delighted to say that the drive continued working without any issues after the bump or the drowning.

The following are benchmarks posted by the SH93. First up is the HDTach screenshot.

Next, we compares the scores to some of the external drives we’ve tested such as the Seagate Free Agent Go, A-DATA’s NH92 and Western Digital’s Firewire based Studio II.

Obviously, the firewire with its higher throughput provers to be the fastest, but coming to USB drives, the SH93 lies pretty much in between the Seagate and the other A-DATA drive meaning its performance is average.

So what you have with the SH93 is an average performing USB drive with a not-so-average design and feature set. If you’re the kind that likes to explore the outdoors and want to carry storage with you for off-loading your camera or carrying your extensive music library, then I would certainly suggest the SH93. And it wont break your bank either at roughly AED 300 for the 320GB version.