Excellent Buy
An excellent system that goes anywhere and is pretty much ready to handle anything, this spinning drive makes data storage a breeze. Total space is actually 464 GB, formatting and what not owning the rest. I chose not to use the pre-installed software, and had no problems with it. This drive runs super quiet and is very shock resistent. I'm extremely happy with it and will definitely buy from Simpletech again.

Dependable and inexpensive.
I bought this drive mainly to collect data from employees computers that were laid off this fall. I was delighted with the ease of operation and the shear amount of data that I was able to get on this thing. I am very happy and satisfied with it's performance. Recommend highly.

Simpletech 500 GB is great
It doesn't do tricks or get me a cold soda, but it does have a neat flashing light as it stores new data. Lets face it, storing data is what's important and this 500 GB hard drive does just that. With USB 2.0 connectivity, what could be easier! To be totally honest, I bought this one as a back-up to my first one(Identical unit) because I had to send the first one for repair of a burnt out power board inside the drive. Customer service was outstanding in that when I spoke to a representative I told him I did not want to ship the actual hard drive from inside the case, so he told me to remove it and only send the case (with the burnt board inside) and the wall transformer. After testing, he replaced the bad board and shipped it back to me free of charge.
So those are my experiences with these units.

Be careful what you buy
Ref: SimpleTech 500 GB external hard drive.

I'm not a very happy camper. I bought the hardware with the CD install disk. Started to install using that disk and received a message that the disk had a Trojan Horse virus on it and my machine would not open it.

Then I emailed Simpletech. Got a link to install software from their internet site, which I did. After installing, tried to hit the back up button and was informed that I had to create a backup folder first. This I did and then did a file dump. It took over 2 hours for the file backup and compare, for about a 1.1 Gig backup. I don't know if that is long or short, but that is the time it took.

Next, I tried to access my Palm Pilot calendar software, only to find out that all my calendar data had disappeared. Emailed Simpletech again to find out why and they stated that their product did not back up or deal with any scheduling software, so their product had nothing to do with the mysterious disappearance. (Note, in fairness, I had not been able to back up my PC scheduler to my handheld device since March of 2008 because of a software glitch with the palm software.)

So then, I called PalmPilot software support. They corrected the glitch that would not allow hotsyncing of the handheld and the PC, but were unable to find the missing calendar files. I was on the phone with them for 3 hours. And they charged me a fee for the technical support.

Bottom line, if you are going to back up your files on a Simpletech device, you should back them up somewhere else first, like a network backup source if you have access to one, so if the software messes with your other programs, you are protected.

Ok while it lasted
Have used it as an offsite backup drive that I keep at my office, bringing home once a week to backup to. Worked fine for that little use until it died recently. It was only 14 months old, guess you do get what you pay for.