It works.
Nice in these times of too-smart USB HDDs with virtual read-only CDs and self-repairing mechanisms that prevent partition deletion, creation and formatting.
It doesn't smell or eat a lot and it's not noisy. Just a nice, straightforward sort of a USB HDD.
The price paid was INR 4,800 which today converts to USD 104.
Update 22jun11:
One of my two Hitachi Simple Drive Min1 500 GB drives died after ~12 months and its warranty replacement was ill on arrival and died the first day. The warranty replacement for that arrived today.
Getting it working was a bit of a performance. Based on previous experience (details in
this LQ post) it was partitioned with free space at the beginning and end of the drive, this time with 100 MB before and after the partition which was formatted with JFS. Transfer rate was ~1 MBps and the drive clicked heavily after a little under 1 GB had been transferred after which nothing was transferred for ~30 seconds. This was repeated ~1 GB later. Enough!
The partition was reformatted with ext3 after which the transfer rate was better at ~5 MBps but stopped after ~30 seconds and did not resume.
The drive was repartitioned exactly as the oldest and still working model with 132 MB free space before the formatted (rounded to 131.61 MB) and 123 MB after (rounded to 123.38 MB). The partition was formatted with ext3 and worked perfectly with a sustained transfer averaging 20+ MBps.
I have no explanation for this behaviour and have changed from recommending this product to not recommending it.