Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go USB 3.0 Portable 500GB review

Verbatim’s latest line of portable hard disks add a splash of colour to what is normally a quite generic looking product. Our review sample came in bright purple, but you also have a whole rainbow of colours to choose from, including orange, blue, pink, green, silver and black.

Colours aside, the Store ‘n’ Go is a fairly compact USB3 portable external hard drive with 500GB storage. It comes pre-formatted as NTFS, with 465GB usable disk space. Its 5,400RPM spindle speed might not lend itself to rapid file transfers, but it still put the extra bandwidth of USB3 to good use in our performance tests, reaching large file writes speeds of 85.7MB/s and read speeds of 103.9MB/s. Small file speeds were generally slower, managing 37.3MB/s reads and 17.4MB/s writes, but this is far from being the slowest disk we’ve seen.

Like most Verbatim portable hard disks, the Store ‘n’ Go USB3 includes a copy of Nero BackItUp & Burn Essentials – it’s surprisingly functional for a piece of free software, with the ability to create full, incremental and automatic backups of your entire system or individual files. The simple layout is easy to navigate and you can also create physical copies if you have a DVD burner. The only downside is that backups have to be opened through the program, rather than in the Windows Explorer.

It’s one of the cheapest portable 500GB disks around, with a price per gigabyte of 11p, but we prefer the slightly faster Seagate Backup Plus Portable 500GB.