Matsunichi 500GB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive Review
Matsunichi 500GB USB 3.0 Portable External Drive
Have you ever heard of consumer electronics company called Matsunichi? Matsunichi was established in 1993 in Hong Kong, China and since 2012 they have been slowly moving into the US market with low cost tablets, streaming media players and storage drives. Believe it or not you can find Matsunichi products online at Amazon, Newegg, Walmart, Tiger Direct and even Best Buy. We managed to get our hands on the Matsunichi 500GB USB 3.0 portable hard drive (DM256-OG-500GB) and thought we’d give it a very quick test drive to see how it performed and if we could figure out what hard drive brand and model Matsunichi is using for these drive enclosures.
The Matsunichi is available in black under part number DM256-BK-500GB for $49.99 shipped, white with part number DM256-WH-500GB for $48.98 shipped or in orange with part number DM256-OG-500GB for $48.99 Shipped. The retail packaging is pretty plain and boring, but what do you expect for a budget drive and most everyone throws the packaging into the recycle bin on day one.
Inside the retail box you’ll find the Matsunichi 500GB USB 3.0 portable hard drive safely tucked inside some laser cut foam along with a rather short 9-inch long blue USB 3.0 data/power cable. No external power is needed since this portable drive uses a low-power 2.5″ notebook hard drive inside! This custom fit foam might be worth saving to store the storage drive in as it keeps the drive safe and will help the cable from getting lost in the house.
The Matsunichi isn’t going to win any awards for being small as it measures 5.4″ x 3.4″ x 0.7″ (137mm x 85mm x 17mm), which makes it slightly larger than a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone and larger that most 2.5″ portable drive enclosures that we’ve seen in recent years. The drive itself looks pretty good though as it has a nice bright orange color with chrome diamonds all over it and chrome frame that holds everything together. The finish is glossy, but you can’t make out fingerprint smudges on it.
On the top of the portable external hard drive you’ll find the USB 3.0 plug and a blue LED power/activity light. It should be noted that nothing comes on the hard drive whatsoever, so there is no bloatware or backup software that will assist you with automated backups. This helps keep costs down and we are fine with that. Matsunichi formatted the 500GB using the NTFS file system by Microsoft, so you’ll be able to use the drive as soon as you plug it into your PC.
Inside we discovered that Matsunichi is using a Seagate Momentus ST9500325AS 500GB 5400RPM hard drive. This 2.5″ notebook hard drive uses the SATA II 3Gb/s interface and has 8MB of cache. This hard drive by itself runs $47.95 plus $5.95 shipping on Amazon. You can buy the Matsunichi 500GB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive in Orange (DM256-OG-500GB) for $48.99 Shipped, so you can get the drive and the enclosure for less than the bare drive!