What, you may ask, has Pininfarina - world famous Italian racing car designer - got to do with an external hard drive?

Well the answer is quite simple; he designed the SimpleTech signature collection of hard drives which were launched by Uniross. Why, you may ask, did he design it? The truth is that we have no idea.

We reviewed the SimpleTech 500GB which, like any other hard drive on the market, was designed to meet the growing needs of digital content enthusiasts – we guess a bit like cars really which were designed to meet the needs of driving enthusiasts.

Straight off the cuff we can tell you the SimpleTech hard drive performed admirably. It stored all the content we told it to store. It backed-up everything it was told to back-up. Basically it did exactly what it was designed to do and it did it well. The device also features Fabrik back-up software. This enables users to set up automatic backups from their computer to the hard drive, but also back-up to a remote site with 2GB of free storage.   

In terms of styling we expected the hard drive to be far flashier than it was. It looks pretty basic with a sports car kind of resemblance, most notable in the nose-cone shape found at the device’s head. Other than that the only really design difference between the SimpleTech hard drive and other such devices was the blue LEDs which lit up in sequence around a track like design on the top of the device’s casing which we later discovered was a capacity meter.

This looked great to begin with but could get irritating if you were watching movies or playing music off it – as it never stops once the device is in use.  In all this is a great device and if you’re thinking about getting one get a red one with the Ferrari logo plastered on it – to get it in any other colour just doesn’t make sense.

Available from STAX, Dion Wired and Trade Centre.