Transcend is best known for its memory cards and RAM, rather than hard drives, but here we've got one of its 2.5'' external hard drives.

Wrapped in a sleek metal case, it has a solid feel without being clunky.

The color of each drive changes according to its logical size: the titanium drive starts at 120 GB, while the light blue has 160 GB and this silver model 250 GB.

The red case you can see in the picture is only available as an enclosure for you to supply your own drive.

Uneven speeds

While they certainly look nice, this line of drives is both longer and wider than most of the others that we've seen designed for 2.5'' drives.

Despite the name, these drives only feature a single USB port, with no FireWire or eSATA--the SATA here refers to the internal connection inside the case, not a port that's available on the outside.



Unusually, the reading and writing speeds offered by this drive over USB are very different: it achieves a fairly average speed of 32 MB/s for reading data, but it's quite a way behind when it comes to speeds of just 22 MB/s for writing files.