Freecom CLS mobile drive review

Reliable backup solutions are essential in office environments, and Freecom's CLS is a little more versatile than your average portable hard drive. The unit is sold individually in capacities ranging from 250GB to 640GB, each sporting a USB 2.0 interface and being solidly designed with a rubberised protective cover.

Where the CLS differs is that it's designed as a multiple-drive backup solution. Each drive comes in its own plastic case with an index card and sports a replaceable slip of paper that can be used to label the current contents.

Freecom is selling the drive as a modern day replacement to tape. It touts it as being ideal for situations where incremental system and content backups need to be performed and maintained over time, and be retrieved quickly and easily when required.

To this end it also offers an optional three-port dock to quickly mount and open multiple drives for data access, avoiding the need to fiddle around with cables.

It's a simple but elegant solution that we can see coming in pretty useful in the right environment, providing that performance is up to scratch.

As mentioned, each drive can be connected directly to a USB port using the short cable supplied. We ran a few read and write tests over a direct connection and were pleased to note that the CLS is pretty quick.

1GB of data appeared on the drive in around 40 seconds (25MB/s) and a 5GB folder transferred a shade slower at 23MB/s. One of the faster drives we've seen recently is the USB 2.0 version of Iomega's eGo Portable, and Freecom has just pipped it for speed here.

We also got our hands on the three-port dock that Freecom offers as an accessory to the CLS drive. This is a powered USB dock tailored to fit the CLS drive, and has an extra USB interface for connecting additional devices.

It works very well and quickly represents any connected drives individually in Windows Explorer, although we did experience some issues when devices are mounted in quick succession. This can be solved by waiting for one to appear on your system before connecting another.

Running the same copy test through the dock reported almost identical speeds, so there are no overheads when connecting multiple drives in this fashion. Copying data between two mounted units predictably took a fair bit longer, however, at half the speed of our earlier tests.

The CLS drive comes pre-formatted and has all the relevant documentation and software preinstalled. Freecom has chosen Nero BackItUp as its backup suite for the CLS range, a tidy and capable collection of tools that's capable of scheduling and automatically maintaining backups of individual files, volumes, drives and selected media.

Full, incremental and differential backups are available, along with three compression levels and a choice of AES or basic encryption to provide peace of mind if the drive is lost or stolen.

The application complements the drive nicely owing to the level of automation available, allowing users to simply connect a CLS and walk away safe in the knowledge that when they pick it up again the data will be refreshed.

A couple of extra tools include 'Green Button', a simple utility that brings some environmentally sound credentials to the table by automatically suspending the disc after a period of inactivity to prolong its life and save power.

There's also a utility to format the drive, although this doesn't offer any functionality outside the conventional alternatives.

Overall we were impressed by the speed and versatility of the CLS, and our main issue is the price. Starting at £69 for 250GB up to £109 for 640GB, it's a fair bit more expensive than its competitors. A dock will set you back £15.99, which is reasonable considering the benefits for those with multiple drives.

Finally, Freecom also offers a data recovery service that costs £24.95 for one hard drive over a period of three years. The service requires you to send the unit to Freecom, after which you'll receive a recovery report and any files that can be saved will be sent to you at no additional charge.

250GB to 640GB; USB 2.0; 109 x 79 x 13mm; 155g