The first time I ordered this, Amazon instead sent me a novelty birthday card featuring a popular felon. How weird is that? Thankfully, Amazon got me the right thing within 24 hours.This is a fine drive. It's a mechanical hard drive, NOT an SSD. There are situations where a mechanical hard drive is preferable -- namely long term storage -- and that's why I opted for this. A mechanical HD is pretty much always going to be bigger than an SSD but this one is nice and slim.The cost per GB is not great here. You could get double the storage for only 20% more or 4x the storage for 2x the price. If all you need is 500 GB, though, why spend the extra $20 or more?

I have a 2TB external SSD to back up my important files on. 2TB is way too much space, so I decided to repurpose it. I bought the 500GB version to replace it as my file backup.The HDD in this unit is a 5400 RPM 2.5" hard drive. I could not find the cache size information. I connected this drive via USB 3.0 and it copied all files quickly. While I didn't time the transfer, it seemed to be just as quick as my external SSD. This makes sense as the USB data rate will be the limiting factor.The drive is also preformatted to an exFAT file system. It's ready to go for either Windows or Mac. No external power is needed, just the USB connecttion. A cable is provided. I didn't hear any sound from the unit while it was writing.The only negative I have is the lack of documentation. Considering what it is, you don't need much. I'm just a bit bummed not knowing how much cache it has. This is a great storage drive. I'd buy it again!

This external drive uses a seagate momentus st9500325as mechanical 5400rpms 8mb cache hard disk drive so it's not a fast drive or will come even close to ssd speeds and i do noticed it seems like they can vary what brand of drive you can get but mine came with the seagate drive, But it does pass all the tests i put it through and when i first received it it had 0hours on it and it is a heathy clean drive so it is a brand new drive and the speed while doing a benchmark on it max i could get out of it was 71.94mbs read and write was 68.02mbs which i shown in my photo so again i wouldn't want to use this for new games but it will work great for backing up files or transferring files to another pc or if you want to clone another 500gb drive or you can use it for a older game drive now i havint tried it with my ps4 cause i got this for a backup drive to use with my computers but i could see it working with the ps4 though.The build quality of the external encloser is very solid and made out of metal and you can forsure feel it in while holding it in your hand and I'm sure it can take a drop and the drive inside it will be protected.I can't take any stars off it cause if you look up usb 3.0 and a 5400rpm hard disk drives it can be from 60mb and up too 90mbs and even the more expensive bigger size with 7200rpms drives will ony get about 200mbs with usb 3.0 which you can't compare speeds to any ssd with any hard disk drives ssd will always be faster, But this drive will be fine for backups or a photo drive or transferring files to another pc which what i will be using it for mostly but it can be used for a older game drive though and for the current price i say it's a good value for the size and the solid metal encloser and it is usb type c so that is always good to see and it also keeps the drive at cooler temps also👍

I was frustrated when looking at the description for this product, as it mentioned nothing about the drive's specs. I gathered it wasn't a solid-state drive (SSD) as it was listed as a hard disk drive (HDD). However, no mention of anything about the speed at which the platters spun was given. The throughput was an obvious fabrication, as physical drives just aren't capable of fully saturating a USB 3.0 interface. It just felt... misleading.It turns out this is a 5400 RPM laptop drive in a metal external enclosure. It's nothing special, in that respect. For the price, you could easily get a name brand drive with a faster platter speed for better random reads. You could even pay a little more for a solid-state drive which will easily outperform this on every level.I'm including the benchmarks I made for several drives for comparison. In order of performance, best to worst:My 500GB internal Western Digital SSD. M.2 SATA interfaceA Samsung M.2 SATA SSD in an SSK external USB enclosureThis JYBD 5400 RPM HDD with external USB enclosureAn old Western Digital 750GB 7200 RPM drive in a Cooler Master X-Craft external enclosureAs you can see, mechanical drives truly suffer when reading and writing smaller blocks of data. As they have to seek space on a spinning platter, there is only so much of the platter that is accessible at a time, and the drive must have some "latency" as it waits for the platter to spin to an appropriate place. For large file reads and writes, this isn't as much of an issue, but small or segmented files can cause performance to drop significantly. Yes, the USB 3 interface is fast, but you will never be able to fully saturate the bandwidth unless something is already in cache memory, and who knows how big that cache is on this device, if it even exists. There is no mention of that in the specs.My external SSD blows this thing away, despite it not measuring up to my internal drive, which is to be expected. If I had a decent internal SSD with a PCI-express interface, it would make all of these look absolutely pitiful.In the context of a mechanical drive, I was pleasantly surprised with the sustained reads and writes for large files. I transferred 58 large files totaling 126.2GiB (1024 MB) in 20 minutes and 13 seconds, sustaining a throughput of 107.7MB/s. For a mechanical laptop drive, it's not awful. I can only assume the older Cooler Master enclosure with the WD drive are being held back by an outdated USB 2.0 interface - the performance of that combination is completely abysmal.Here's the thing - I don't trust mechanical drives as much as I do a reputable SSD, particularly for portable devices. The little actuator arms can dig into the surface of the platters if the drive is jostled while it is running, damaging the surface and potentially creating a cascade failure as that defect causes the heads to jump, hit other places on the platters, causing more damage, etc. I will use this to hold files I don't care too much about but that I'm not ready to let go of.For the price, I would suggest doing a bit more looking around. At the very least, look for well-known brands of HDDs. There are better values out there for those willing to do more investigation or spend a little more money on a reputable SSD.