Formac Disk Oxygen Hard drive 250 GB > Reviews > very bad first impression

Author's product rating:   

Memory / capacity	Excellent
Reliability	Average
Ease of Installation	Very poor - very time consuming and confusing
Speed	Very fast
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	ease of connection
Disadvantages:	shockingly bad complete lack of guidance for set up

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Brought this hard drive for about £70 from DABS, a good deal, with good specs, and as my PC is about to go pop, thought it was high time I backed up all the good stuff.
Delivered in very short time by DABS, opened up the box, first impressions are that I should have paid attention to the dimensions. If you want something cute and small, try a hamster, this is not small. In fact, I couldn't find a place on my desk for it, so it's now sat on top of the PC, and almost fills the top of the base unit.
That said it's an attractive looking thing. If that's what you're looking for.
Set up:
Switch on the PC, plug in the power, plug in the firewire lead and the light comes on and that it would appear is that.
Except it's not. Looking on my computer, shows no new spangly hard disc, standing by to save my good stuff. Look in device manager, and here it is, all working properly (you lie device manager)
Look on the disc, masses of folders and files, all gibberish and unreadable by my computer. Finally find a manual, contains a 16 page PDF document. Quite possibly the worst manual I have ever seen. It's not until page 10 that you get a bit about setting it up on your computer. Then all it tells you is to get windows to do it.
Now I am not an expert so having sought some advice, I identify that I have to do some with with disk management, and eventually work out myself that it needs a partition, drive letter and formatting. Quite important, and some guidance from Formac would have been nice.
It's now working, it's very quiet, and lightening fast, but first impressions do count, and the stress of setting it up, with the gradual dawning that it may have to go back with all the hassle that entails, has spoiled the relationship for me. Now it will just be a grudging acknowledgement of something under the desk that I can save my stuff to. Not the shiney new gadget to love and cherish that it could have been.
Recommended if you know a bit about installing hard drives, not if you are new to it likee me. Unless of course my experience has pointed you in the right direction.