For the better part of a month I have been searching high and low for a new external hard drive.

Sadly, my last drive died after years of loyal service. The reason for its death you say? I might have accidentally dropped the drive. This wasn’t the first time I had dropped the drive but it was the last.

So when ADATA approached me to review the HD710 Pro I jumped at the chance.

Transfer season

While the HD710 Pro does have a 1TB drive contained within its rugged exterior it is a slow 5400RPM Seagate drive (ST1000LM035) designed for notebooks.

Speeds are decent but they won’t really blow your hair back. During testing we saw average sequential read speed of 140.4MB/s and an average sequential write speed of 138.6MB/s.

This should be fine for those looking for a big drive to store media for streaming to a media player though you may encounter some lag while streaming a 4K video due to the slower 5400RPM drive.

When transferring large files (10GB) we note a transfer time of roughly 10 minutes when copying to the hard drive and roughly 12 minutes when copying from the drive.

Like we said, decent but it won’t blow your hair back.

The drive sports one USB Type Micro-B USB 3.0 port with an included cable that ends in the USB Type A port we all know so well.

Safer, I hope

As we mentioned the HD710 Pro is covered in a rugged material that not only stops it from slipping across the desk but also protects it from water and dust.

The drive carries an IP68 rating for dust and water meaning you can submerge the drive in up to 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes.
Naturally you shouldn’t do that but we did.

There is a little tab above the USB port that can be closed which we did before submerging the drive in water briefly.

Lo and behold the IP68 rating held up.

In terms of dust I didn’t see much build up in the week it spent on top of my desktop tower
The drive also boasts military grade shock resistance which translates to mean if you drop it you won’t have an expensive drinks coaster on your hands.

Conclusion

The ADATA HD710 Pro is really about as good as you would expect most external drives to be. This one is a bit slow considering it houses a 5400RPM drive but you do get a rugged exterior to protect it from drops and drips.

The price is also rather high at R1 109 and while it’s not egregious you can pick up a drive that is cheaper. What you won’t get with any other drive is the rugged exterior that protects your drive not only from water and dust but unexpected drops as well.

You will need to decide if that IP68 protection and shock resistance is worth the price of admission. For myself, and my clumsy hands it definitely is.

[su_box title=”ADATA HD710 Pro Specifications” box_color=”#f37021″]

Maximum capacity 1TB

HDD speed 5400RPM

Interface USB 3.1

Maximum bandwidth 5Gbps

Weight 270g

Price R1 109

[/su_box]