Design

We simply can’t look at the HP SimpleSave Portable 320GB and not think of it as a WD Passport drive — and there’s good reason for that. Save for the HP logo, and suitably spidery font on the box itself, this is a WD Passport drive with backup software included. That’s no bad thing per se. Western Digital’s external drives are stylish enough, and this one is too. Well, as long as you like black, that is. The drive runs from a single USB 2.0 port and aside from a connection cable and the drive in the box, that’s all you get.

Features

So what’s the HP connection? Essentially, it’s in the branding — HP takes heavy prominence in the box and on the drive itself — and the supplied backup software, dubbed HP SimpleSave. Backup software on an external drive isn’t exactly a new or astonishing idea, but HP’s trying to hit the target market of those people who find backup too challenging or boring. In other words, pretty much everybody, and especially those who haven’t had a data disaster to date. Those who have lost data are probably already backing up as it is.

There’s a fine line between ease of use and providing enough features, and we still can’t decide if the SimpleSave is to be applauded for providing simple backup, or derided for not providing enough granular features. Yes, it does back up your files according to location and file type, but with no additional features at all. You can’t schedule backups — aside from unplugging and re-plugging the drive, that is — and you can’t create discrete backup sets or for that matter create a recovery image of your entire PC.

Performance

When you first plug in the SimpleSave drive, it’ll launch the backup application and scan the PC (Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 only) for files it’s happy to back up. By default it’ll search for common media and office files, but you can specify custom folder locations and file extensions to include in backup sets. Each backup set is given a unique name based on the PC it’s plugged into, so you can backup multiple systems as long as the storage holds out. Backups aren’t incrementally stored, so each time you plug the drive in, it’ll overwrite any newer files automatically.

As with most backup software, the first time you do create a backup set, be prepared to wait. Our sample 60GB backup set took just under two hours to complete for an initial run, although it was quicker thereafter. We also encountered a problem with our first backup, which alarmed us — especially as a large splash screen comes up to inform you that there’s a problem in HP’s distinctive spidery font. Was it a corrupt file? A missing network link? Some kind of unsupported file?

Nope. It turns out that the SimpleSave software can’t handle very long file paths and file names. For the record, it gave us the following error:

“File name or path name is too long. : C:Documents and SettingsAlexMy DocumentsMy MusicJohn Williams (Composer)Star Wars Episode VI- Return Of The Jedi (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)Brother and Sister_Father and Son_The Fleet Enters Hyperspace_Heroic Ewok (Medley).wma”

Now, admittedly, that’s a heck of a song title and a pretty deep file path, although it’s also exactly as named from the music store we’d bought it from, so it’s not as though we’d deliberately created it to stump backup software. Windows itself certainly had no problems manually copying the file onto the SimpleSave drive after the fact, so it’s definitely the backup software itself that has the problem.

External drives are stupidly common, and without the lure of easy backup software we’d write the SimpleSave off as just another relatively slow drive. Used purely within the context of backup — and presuming you’re going to keep it plugged in pretty constantly — it’s reasonably priced for the data on offer, especially compared to the cost of data recovery services.

HP (Hewlett-Packard) Simplesave Portable 320GB Reviewed by Cnet