The Adata DashDrive Elite HE720 (500GB) external hard drive ($69.99) bundles strong performance with a lovely design, but its higher price-per-gigabyte ratio, short cable, and lackluster software gives us pause. The drive is extraordinarily thin in its design—perfect to stuff into a messenger bag or, honestly, a pocket. A single USB 3.0 Micro B port is all you get to connect with, but it’s one of the fairly new micro-data/power connectors that eliminates the need for supplemental cables going all over the place. Just don’t lose that cable; your speeds plummet if you connect up to the drive using a standard micro USB cable.

Design and Features
The drive, which Adata exuberantly describes on its website as “the
thinnest of them all!!” certainly earns its self-praise. It’s not so much the device’s length and width that’s noteworthy—at 4.6 by 3.1 inches (HWD), it feels like the slightly bigger cousin of a typical smartphone. The HE720($3,153.25 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) manages to pack a 500GB, 5,400rpm Hitachi Travelstar Z5K500 drive within a case that’s barely thicker than the drive itself: an 0.28-inch thick hunk of storage with a tiny, 0.12-inch wrapper. To continue the smartphone analogy, the HE720 pretty much leveled out with an HTC One when we sat both side-by-side on a desk.

The HE720 comes in a brushed stainless steel exterior. Hold the drive in your hand, and a polished band of steel wraps around the device like a ribbon one might fasten around a birthday present. Perpendicular to this, a thin band of what we surmise is black plastic wraps around the drive’s circumference. It’s not just for looks: Though it’s a pleasant accent to the otherwise metallic drive, the protruding plastic provides a bit of protection for when one invariably drops the drive onto the floor. It’s similar in concept the protectors one might install on a car door to keep others from scratching it in a parking lot.

A bright, blue LED light sits on the top of the HE720, right in the lower-center of the panel. Right below it, on the device’s side, is where you’ll find its single connector: a USB 3.0 Micro B port, which connects to the 13-inch USB 3.0 cable that ships with the drive. While we’re used to short cables on external drives, we wish that the HE720’s was a bit longer than what Adata provides.

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If you’re worried that losing this cable might cost you the usefulness of the drive (given that USB 3.0 Micro B cables are a bit rarer to have lying around than a typical micro USB cable), we have somewhat good news. We connected the drive up to our USB 3.0-based desktop using a standard micro USB 2.0 cable and had absolutely zero problems accessing our files. The caveat? It took the drive more than twice the amount of time to make it through our 1.22GB drag-and-drop test (33.8 seconds) using a standard micro-USB cable than the USB 3.0 Micro B cable (14.2 seconds). The HE720 has a three-year warranty, good for pocket drives and matching that of similar drives like the Toshiba Canvio Slim II (1TB)($101.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) and the current portable drive Editors’ Choice Seagate Backup Plus Fast($350.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), but besting our former Editors’ Choice, Seagate’s Backup Plus, by a full year.

Performance
We run PCMark05 HDD and PCMark 7 tests, both of which are a collection of workloads, like that test the hard drive’s speed on common productivity tasks. PCMark 7 only runs on NTFS-formatted drives, so we run PCMark05 for backwards comparison, and for compatibility with FAT formatted hard drives when necessary. The HE720 garnered a score of 3,573 on PCMark05. That’s not a great score compared to our top choice in the category, the $140 Seagate Backup Plus (6,463). However, its overall score of 1,312 points on PCMark 7 comes fairly close to the 1,449 of the Seagate drive and the ToshibaCanvio Slim II’s 1,488. On our aforementioned drag-and-drop test, the HE720’s 14.2-second transfer time was right in the middle of devices like the speedy G-Technology G-Drive Slim (10 seconds), the Lacie P’9223 Slim (13 seconds), and the Toshiba Slim II (18 seconds).

In other words, Adata’s 5,400rpm drive doesn’t deliver Earth-shattering performance, but it holds its own among its peers. Where the drive does end up falling a bit on its face is its included software. Adata only offers up a single utility on the HE720: AdataSync, an app to sync your files to the drive. It doesn’t auto-install—thankfully—but it’s a pretty lackluster offering. The Canvio Slim II, in comparison, comes with a useful, automated, encrypted backup app; an app for cloud-based file access and media streaming with 10GB free storage; and an app for password-protecting the drive.

When installed, the app rests in your system tray as a conventional shortcut and is duplicated as an ugly combination of a bird logo and a shortcut icon that sits on top of every other window in the upper-left corner of your desktop.

Thankfully, right-clicking on the icons give you the option to hide them. We’re just amazed that we have to, and it’s the right cross in a combination of annoyances that began when AdataSync delivered up a User Account Control message every time we booted up our Windows 8.1 machine. If you want AdataSync to load at startup, you’re going to lose the ability to have a smooth, interruption-free trip to your desktop.

All that hassle, and the app is pretty dull once you finally get it going. So long as your Adata drive is connected to your system, AdataSync allows you to select folders on your system that you want to back up to, restore from, or keep synchronized to the HE720. You would think that the last option would constantly scan your drive or the contents of a mapped HE720 folder and update file changes as you make them. Not so; you have to manually execute the synchronization each and every time you want it to happen, which kind of makes the word—and action—lose a bit of its luster. We’ll gladly take the freeware “SyncBack” app any day instead of this hassle.

Conclusion
We love the look and svelte size of the Adata DashDrive Elite HE720 (500GB) portable hard drive. Its performance fits the expectations we have for any non-SSD, USB 3.0 device, and it’s a good alternative for those who just want storage—but only those constrained by a budget. The more versatile, faster, and more user-friendly Seagate Backup Plus and Seagate Backup Plus Fast, both Editors’ Choice drives, are the ones to beat for those looking for a comprehensive external storage solution. Another alternative is Toshiba’s Canvio Slim II—which the HE720 beats on some benchmark tests, but loses on others. It’s pricier on paper, but the overall dollar-per-gigabyte ratio is better ($0.10 versus $0.14), and the apps are considerably stronger. Delete the HE720’s app from the drive, and you’ll be a bit better off than when you started.