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Imation Apollo Expert D300 USB 3.0 (2TB) external hard drive review
Jason Tsay
If you’re looking for an external volume to backup all your data, you’re going to need lots of space. But you don’t want to sit around all day waiting for the copying to finish so you’re going to need quick transfer speeds as well. The Imation Apollo Expert D300 desktop hard drive provides a hefty 2TB of storage for daily backups as well as a USB 3.0 connector to speed things up.
Features
- USB 3.0 connection
- 500GB, 1TB, 2TB variations
- 3.5” form factor
- Removable stand
- ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup, Norton Online Backup software
- 2 year warranty
Our Impressions
Unpacking the Apollo Expert D300’s cardboard box reveals the hard drive, a plastic stand, AC adapter, 2 plug adapters, USB 3.0 cable, and quick start guide.
The Apollo Expert D300 (made in Thailand) is about as big as a paperback novel (Harry Potter book one sized) and is fairly clean in design. The entire plastic surface takes the appearance of brushed aluminum, which combines with the angular corners for a somewhat rugged look. The front of the drive has a power button while the back has a heat dispersion area and ports. If you choose to use the hard drive in a vertical orientation, simply slide it into the included plastic stand. Note that it doesn’t click into place or anything - you can adjust it to any position you’d like.
Firing up CrystalDiskInfo revealed that the beast within the Apollo Expert is a Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 2000.3 GB hard drive spinning at a rate of 7200 rpm with a buffer size of 29999 KB. The temperature ran at around 42 degrees Celsius which is about average but at times would go up as high as 56 degrees which is definitely on the higher end of the spectrum.
We plugged in the USB 3.0 connector to the corresponding slot on our computer, plugged in the AC adapter, and pressed the power button. The Apollo Expert D300 instantly roared to life emitting and shook our table with its vibrations. Windows instantly recognized the drive and prompted us with a 1.81 TB “APOLLO.” Rather than having an annoying virtual CD pop up, the folks at Imation decided to bundle in Arcsoft TotalMedia Backup and Norton Online Backup (for Mac and Windows) simply as files on the drive. Unfortunately, the Norton backup is only a 60 day trial.
We ran the Apollo Expert through five 1000MB test runs using CrystalDiskMark. Here are the results
Seq - 140.9 MB/s (read) and 139.2 MB/s (write)
512K - 53.92 MB/s (read) and 65.53 MB/s (write)
4K - 0.687 MB/s (read) and 1.308 MB/s (write)
4K QD32 - 0.745 MB/s (read) and 1.334 MB/s (write)
Overall
Overall, we were pretty satisfied with the Apollo Expert D300. It was able to backup all of our files quickly and easily through a USB 3.0 connection. Unfortunately, it isn’t the quietest of hard drives and tended to get pretty hot after a while. If you’ve got a lot of data and are looking for a way to back it all up, the Apollo Expert is definitely worth a look but at that price, we’d have to give it some thought before we pulled out our credit cards.
Pro’s
- USB 3.0 speeds
- 2 TB of storage
- clean design
Con’s
- pretty loud
- can get warm
- 2 year warranty is fairly short
Where to buy
Imation — MSRP: $219.99
This review was done by Jason Tsay, who was provided the Apollo Expert D300 by Imation.
