Freecom mHDD Slim
Attractive storage at an unattractive price
£125 from Freecom, freecom.com features 2TB (tested, 1TB available), USB-A and USB-C cables
High-capacity 2.5inch hard drives can feel thick, but this one is just 9mm tall. It weighs only 150g too, even though its body is metal. Press on its largest sides and you can feel a little bit of flex, so we suggest transporting it in a padded pocket. It’s also emblazoned with Freecom’s logo, though in a manner that’s fairly inoffensive, even though the line underneath makes the drive look a bit like a large Zippo lighter.
It’s clear Freecom has thought where the Mac’s connectivity is likely to go, as it bundles two USB cables: one to connect to a USB-A port, found on most Macs, and a USB-C one for 12-inch MacBooks and any future Macs with it – though that’s only fair at this price!
As for performance, the drive is what we’d expect from a 2.5-inch hard disk, though a few things stood out. While minimum rates for sequential transfers on drives of this kind aren’t stellar, the mHDD managed respectable 30.4MB/sec and 27.8MB/sec rates for reading and writing, respectively. Its mean sequential rates of 120.4 and 121.6MB/sec are typical, and its peak rate of 167.7MB/sec when writing is solid, even if not the best. In random reads and writes, the drive’s a little behind others we’ve tried, but not by enough that it’s a drawback.