With its combination of USB 2.0 and eSATA, Kwest's 3.5'' Evolution 500 GB gives you very speedy access to an awful lot of data.

As well as giving it a refined look, the black aluminum case with red trim keeps the disk platters cool so they can work to the best of their ability.

With this much storage space, and data transfer rates that are--theoretically at least--five times faster than USB 2.0 thanks to the inclusion of the eSATA connection, the Evolution 500 GB seems the perfect solution if you've filled your internal hard drive up to the brim with no room to spare.

But is it as speedy as the competition?

Good speeds over USB 2.0

Well, in practice this Memup drive didn't disappoint and fought its way right to the very top of our speed table.

On the majority of tests, it managed speeds as good as our current reference, the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition.



Record-breaking performance from eSATA

Memup's drive really came into its own when we measured its speeds over eSATA, where it broke all our records by around 20 MB/s for both reading and writing. 

Provided you've got an eSATA connection to hand on your computer, this is by far the fastest external drive we've ever tested. 

In fact, it's so fast that it's just 1 MB/s second slower than a double drive like the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 2 TB which puts two identical disks side by side in a RAID array.