What makes a hard drive fast? A USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connection? Solid state technology? Or maybe it’s a go faster stripe, like the one found on the Verbatim GT Portable Hard Drive.

Verbatim is billing this as one of its fastest external hard drives. Along with a racing stripe, the drive comes with a write protection switch that can be quickly flipped to make sure that important data kept on the drive is protected. It’s a nice touch, and means that you don’t have to go into the drive’s options in Windows to turn on write protection.

Included on the hard drive is the Nero BackItUp Essentials software for backing up your PC, as well as software for using the drive’s energy saving modes.

Of course what was of most interest to us, thanks to Verbatim’s advertising of the GT Portable Hard Drive, was its speeds.

While there has obviously been a lot of work on making this a very fast hard drive in a lot of respects, the fact that the drive is still mechanical, rather than a solid state drive, keeps the Verbatim GT Portable Hard Drive from achieving its full potential.

Admittedly, this means that the Verbatim GT Portable Hard Drive comes in high capacities (500GB and 1TB) while remaining affordable, and with USB 3.0 the limit on drive speed won’t be so noticeable. So how did it fare in our tests?

In our benchmarks, the Verbatim GT Portable Hard Drive recorded a very decent 104.55MB/s sequential write speed, and a 105.44MB/s read speed, which is higher than a lot of its competitors – especially at this price point. In our real world test we were able to copy over a 1.36GB test file in just 20 seconds.

Verdict

So does the Verbatim GT Portable Hard Drive live up to its manufacturer’s boast of this being an extremely fast drive? Happily we can report that considering both the capacity of the drive and the low price, you’d struggle to get a faster drive.

Sure, you can get faster external drives, but you’re going to be paying a lot more, and not getting as large a capacity, in exchange for speed.