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The 500GB NH01 Nobility isn’t the first portable USB3 disk we’ve seen – that honour goes to the LaCie 500GB Rugged USB3. While The Rugged costs £129, or a high 26p per gigabyte, the Nobility costs just 15p per gigabyte, which is little more than a USB2 portable disk.
As expected for a USB3 external hard drive, the Nobility sped through our file transfer tests copying large files at an overall speed of 73.8MB/s while small files were transferred at an average speed of 51.4MB/s.
The Rugged was around 30MB/s faster copying large files and 20MB/s faster transferring small files though. The speed difference is due to the fact that the Rugged uses a 7,200rpm disk while the Nobility uses a 5,400rpm disk. Nevertheless, the Nobility is still far faster than any USB2 disk.
The Nobility doesn’t feel quite as robust as the Rugged and its black plastic casing creaks under pressure a little. It doesn’t come with any backup software either. Nevertheless if you want fast performance from a portable hard disk, the Nobility is good value. It’s not as fast as the Rugged, but it is far cheaper and is still quick.
