Freecom brings the latest in high-speed connectivity to the portable storage market with its new 500GB Hard Drive Pro. Sporting lightning fast 3,000Mbps eSata as standard, you have a choice of USB 2.0 or Firewire 400/800 as an accompaniment. ESata is still gathering pace in the mainstream market, but with speeds over six times faster than USB 2.0 it's likely to be a big hit.

Despite most closely resembling a slab of aluminium from a metal yard, Freecom's design ethos obviously appealed to those in the know when it won an iF Product Design award in 2007. It's a typically minimalist effort with connectivity and power on the back and two controls on the front to switch it on and perform an automatic synchronisation.

Provided on CD is Acronis True Image and Freecom's Personal Media Suite and Backup applications. These pretty much cover every way you'd typically want to back up data, with the headline Acronis package managing images of your hard drives to allow you to easily copy entire partitions or drives as well as updating existing images with any files or folders that have been changed.

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Freecom's backup software gives you slightly more control by allowing you to select specific documents, folders or file types to copy across. Freecom's Personal Media Suite is slightly more problematic, as here you have the option to backup and encrypt files to a secure folder. In addition, Freecom Sync allows you to choose certain files or folders that will be synchronised with existing copies on your external drive whenever they are changed or appended to.

The reason these tools aren't quite so nice to use is that you're given no real indication of progress during this backup or synchronisation process, and very little reassurance that your files have been successfully saved. The interface is also particularly poor and often very confusing, so you might end up resorting to alternative methods to keep things in order.

This aside, we have no problems with the design or functionality of the drive itself. The official selling price of the 500GB eSata/USB2.0 model is £159.99, but you can pick it up online for about £140. This isn't overpriced but you will find other 500GB enclosures for quite a bit less if you shop around. However, with its eSata connectivity, Freecom's is better prepared than most for the next phase of data transfer standards and, if you think you'll take advantage of this at some point in the near future, you might consider it a safer bet.

Freecom's Hard Drive Pro is a solid enough offering from a hardware point of view, but the supplied software lets it down a little, with poor usability and a lack of information on backup progress. If you're looking to take advantage of eSata or you already have it, though, it's a reasonably priced solution for access to the latest technology.