Review of Cirago CST4150 1.5TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

Years ago, hard drive space was a luxury. My first Macintosh computer had a 120MB hard drive. Moving into PC world, I thought I could store every file in existence when I got my first 2GB drive. Now, many years later, I have more than 3GB worth of stored e-mails in my Gmail account alone, and like many people, have multiple external drives covering my desk to store a mad amount of data. As time has gone by, people need more and more space, and any avid computer user has some measure of storage that would have been unfathomable in the days of the Performa 450. Fortunately, it’s not 1993 anymore, and storage keeps getting easier to come by and considerably more inexpensive.

Today, I have one of Cirago’s newest external hard drive models for review. It is a 1.5TB plug and play drive that operates with USB 2.0. It is simplistic, effective and very easy to use.

Specifications:

Cirago CST4150 1.5TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

Features:
-Compact and efficient 3.5” form factor
-Reliable storage solution for USB 2.0 interface
-Higher performance transfers (up to 480Mbps, USB 2.0)
-Plug and Play / Easy to use
-Share any data, image, music, video and more
-Supports PC (Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista), MAC (MAC OS8.6 or above) and Linux
-Active LED power and access indicator
-Aluminum Case for efficient cooling
-Includes stand for upright positioning

Specs:
Interface: USB 2.0
Hard drive Interface: SATA Hard Drive 7200 rpm
Form Factor: 3.5″
Power: 12V 1.5A, AC/DC adapter included
Warranty: 1 year
Dimension: 7 x 4.5 x 1.2 in (unit) / 10 x 7.5 x 3.6 in (retail box)”

Unboxing:

The packaging for the drive is pretty standard. It comes in a common rectangular cardboard box with all the important information about the drive on the front and back.

Opening it up, we find the small booklets and documentation on top with the drive underneath. Hidden beneath the drive are the required accessories – the power cable, USB cable, and stand.

The drive itself is packaged in a thin foam sleeve. The USB cable and plastic base are also wrapped in basic plastic bags.

The drive is extremely shiny. The best way to describe its texture is glittery. There are definite sparkles all over the thing that glisten even under normal household light. The silver body makes up most of the drive aside from the ends, which are black plastic. I personally don’t care all that much what a drive looks like, but there you have it. The Cirago name and a few beveled lines also decorate each side.

On the back end you’ll find the USB input, power input and on/off switch.

The case itself is made out of aluminum, which is not only durable and lightweight, but good for cooling. Aluminum makes for great hard drive housing and is nice to see here.

I know, unboxing a hard drive isn’t tremendously thrilling. Let’s move on to how it works…

Installation, Performance, Comparison

In my opinion, the average consumer doesn’t buy an external hard drive because of the results of a bunch of benchmark tests and other technobabble. Benchmarks are not interesting, even to me, and therefore I’m not going to show you a bunch of charts and graphs that probably don’t reflect real-life usage anyway. I’d rather provide information general people can understand.

These days, users have certain storage requirements and buy external hard drives primarily to dump data or perform backups of their systems. I see four main things that people care about when choosing the drive they’ll buy:

How much does it cost?
How large is the storage capacity?
Is it a reliable piece of equipment, and how well does it work?
How much space is it going to take up?

As such, we’ll take a look at this drive, using the above from a typical consumer standpoint.

At the time of this writing, the Cirago CST4150 will run you about $115-120, which puts it in the low to average price range for a basic 1.5TB external HD. If it performs well, that’s a plus right off the bat.

I first opened the instruction manual for the drive to make sure there weren’t going to be any secrets when I hooked it up. This certainly wasn’t the case, as the instruction manual isn’t really an instruction manual at all. It basically says “plug it in and use it.” Fortunately, that’s really all it took.

I popped the USB cable into the computer, flicked the On switch, and a few seconds later had a new K:\ drive with 1.36TB of usable space. Windows 7 didn’t need me to do anything special and didn’t hesitate for an instant before giving me a new, accessible drive. Truly a plug and play enclosure.

I then went to transfer some files to see how long some real-life backing up would take. For the sake of the test, I transferred a huge folder full of all sorts of files – web pages, video, audio, random data, documents and more, to simulate the type of system or server backup someone would normally be doing. The folder contained a total of 18,468 files and was 1.51GB in capacity. That’s a mad load of files for that amount of space, so this would likely give a good idea of the worst-case scenario when it comes to transfer times.

When the box first popped up, it told me it would be 3.5 minutes to transfer the files. Over a USB 2.0 connection, that was clearly way too fast, so I waited another minute to see how that changed.

After four minutes, it said there would be 26 minutes left.

After nine minutes, there were still 10 minutes remaining.

As with most calculated times, they ended up being meaningless. In reality, the backup took about 12 minutes to transfer the entire 1.5GB folder. That breaks down to 125.83MB per minute, or 1,539 files per minute.

Comparatively, transferring one single file that was 170MB in size took only about 9-10 seconds. Clearly the speed of the larger transfer was because of the number of the files, and is indeed a better projection of a normal system/server dump backup. However, it is nice to see that the single-file transfer rate was indeed brisk. I wouldn’t be too hesitant about relying on this drive to read/write very large files with ease. I formerly worked in video editing and constantly saved huge video projects to USB drives, often with quite a wait. I wouldn’t be afraid to use this drive for that type of application.

So, if you are buying this drive to do full backups of your system or a web server or anything with tons of individual files, expect it to handle it at a modest pace. If you are using it to save clumps of files or hold smaller numbers of larger files, it will do an excellent job and get the data there.

Either way, I’ve been transferring various files back and forth between my machine and the drive for several days now (since starting this review) without any problems. There haven’t been any file transfer problems, drops in connection or anything else unpleasant.

On the desk, the hard drive is not a lot larger or smaller than a standard enclosure. It measures 7” x 4.5” x 1.2”. Since it has a stand that allows you to sit it on the 1.2” vertical end, you aren’t looking at a ton of real estate being taken up by the drive.

There are a few desk shots showing the drive in a real-life setting. You can see Douglas, my co-editor, sitting next to it ensuring that operations go smoothly. Yeah, that’s right – my little teddy bear sits on my desk and has a name. My wife gave him to me the week we first met. With a Snickers bar. Deal with it.

You’ll also see there are a few blue LED lights on the front end of the drive. Here are a few lower-light shots of them:

There is no option to turn these LEDs off, so if you don’t dig them, that’s too bad. They’re not just there for show, however, as they flicker when you are transferring data. This is one way you can assure that data is moving, so that’s somewhat of a cool touch.

Conclusion:

This drive advertises itself as a quick, basic, 1.5TB aluminum USB external hard drive good for storing your extra data. It’s supposed to be plug and play, easy to use, and work with any operating system. As far as all the above goes, it has lived up to its claims and hasn’t shown any problems. I had no trouble using the hard drive and doing all the things a common computer would do with the device. To me, that makes it a pretty successful product.

With a nice price tag that will only come down, an enclosure that isn’t an eyesore and included USB cabling and stand, this is a nice drive for someone looking for a place to dump extra data or store system backups.

Pros:

+Not overpriced

+Structurally solid aluminum shell

+Easy plug and play functionality

Cons:

-Transfer rate for a giant load of files wasn’t anything super impressive

-LEDs have to be on