At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Very small
good value
robust build
large 320GB capacity
good performance
three-year warranty

Cons

5,400rpm disk speed might feel restrictive to some

Our Verdict

We can’t fault the G-Drive Slim. It is very slim and fast, as well as being robust. The £78 price tag is good for a device of this quality too. If you’re after a portable drive to complement your MacBook Air, or any MacBook really, the G-Drive slim would be a great choice.

The G-Drive slim from Hitachi is a new portable hard drive that claims to be the thinnest drive of its type. And it is indeed very thin, at just 9.9mm tall, and 128mm long by 82mm wide, and housed in a light-weight aluminium enclosure.

The finish has a rough feel to it rather than a brushed aluminium style, but this does make it easier to grip and less likely to slip off smooth surfaces. It’s powered though the USB cable so it’s stealing power from your Mac, but that does mean there’s no extra power brick to carry around with you. The 320GB capacity is enough for about 320 hours of standard definition movies or 80,000 songs all available for £78.

The clear move towards flash memory-based storage has, in the short term at least, seen a reduction in capacities. The biggest SSD you can get for a MacBook Air for example, is 256GB and that’s the top of the line model. The G-Drive slim is a traditional hard drive, but still manages to be extremely small and lightweight, but has the advantage of larger capacity and lower price.

The G-Drive slim is indeed very slim and the perfect accompaniment to a portable Mac for storage, backup or both

The combination of a lower capacity flash-based MacBook and one of these drives is probably the perfect match. You can use it to store all your music, video and other large files and keep the SSD in your Mac relatively clutter free. On the other hand, you can use the disk as a portable Time Machine backup drive – it’s Time Machine ready right out of the box. Whichever route you go down the G-Drive slim won’t be adding very much weight to your mobile setup.

We were impressed by the performance of the G-Drive slim. It’s got a slower 5,400rpm disk than that of a desktop equivalent, but for all but the most demanding of video or image editing tasks that’s more than quick enough.