This external hard drive, the Memup Kwest Evolution 2.5 250 GB, is the exact miniature of its big brother, the 500 GB 3.5'' version.

Both drives share the same interface, with a USB 2.0 port sitting alongside an eSATA, a promising specification.

But do the speeds on offer match up?
When it comes to looks, this 2.5'' version is attractive enough, but when it comes to performance, the data transfer rates offered by its USB port don't really beat any of the others on offer.  

As an example, we observed speeds of 32.5 MB/s for reading and 23 MB/s for writing, which is a little below average.




This poor performance is entirely forgiveable when you look at the speeds achieved over eSATA, where it's the only vaguely affordable drive of this size to use this connection.

We measured excellent speeds of 56 MB/s for reading and 52.5 MB/s for writing, compared to the 41 MB/s and 31.7 MB/s of the LaCie Little Disk 250 GB over FireWire 400.

Or, to put it another way: SATA is just plain faster than FireWire 400.