ADATA Nobility 1TB review

With a sleek brushed metal finish, the Nobility is Adata’s professional grade portable hard disk. With a 1TB 2.5in disk inside, it should be more than large enough for keeping all your important files with you when on the move. The blue activity LED lets you know when the disk is being accessed, so you don’t accidentally remove it while files are being transferred.

The disk’s spindle speed might only be 5,400RPM, but the Nobility includes USB3 support for extra bandwidth when transferring files. In our performance benchmarks, it managed 86.4MB/s write and 103.4MB/s read speeds when handling large files. Small files were tougher, bringing write speeds to 25.6MB/s and read speeds to 39.1MB/s. This is about average for a portable external hard drive, so don’t expect to be blown away by rapid file transfers.

There’s no mention of it on the box, but ADATA bundles a copy of its own HDDtoGo software with the disk – you have to download it from the web, as it isn’t pre-installed. It can back up your Windows mail inbox and duplicate specific folders to the drive, but it can’t perform true backups of your entire system.

At a very reasonable 12p per gigabyte, the 1TB Nobility is priced on a similar scale to 500GB portable disks. The lack of any software bundle whatsoever is a little disappointing, but the design is top notch and performance average. If you need a large amount of storage when on the move, this is a great choice, but the better-performing Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB just edges it out if you don’t need this much capacity.