Freecom Classic SL 320 GB > Reviews > Classic but modern.

Author's product rating:   

Memory / capacity	Excellent
Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed	Fast
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Massive amount of storage at a reasonable price, nice design
Disadvantages:	Quite noisy

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

After a previous experience of my operating system needing a complete re-install and my internal hard drive nearly full of applications and media files. I needed a storage device I could back up and move all my files to, speed up my hard drive and have programs stored in case my operating system would decide to give up on me again.

External storage has come down in price a lot lately, and I thought now was a good time to buy. I needed a good amount of space, something that could move files from one device to another quickly, something affordable and something with a recognised name. I've used Freecom products before and I've never had a problem with them. During my search of external hard drives, this hard drive came in a range of sizes from 40gb to 500gb. The 320gb were available at Amazon for £79.99, which was the best price around after time using price comparison engines. This drive is currently available at amazon.co.uk for £74.99. Which is going to be the best price you will find for a capacity of this size and with a recognised manufacturer, you can't even buy it at that price through the Freecom web site!

I was impressed with the design of the device, I have the silver version which fits in with my other computer peripherals. It's about 20cm by 14cm by 5cm in size, so it doesn't take up a lot of desk space. Installation is very easy with an XP machine, you plug in the power cable and the USB cable, connect to your PC and switch it on. XP will automatically find the hard drive and within seconds you can start transferring files to and from the device. The device runs at 7200rpm, which is about standard for today's hard drives. To transfer a 150mb file to the device it takes about 10 seconds. I had to transfer roughly 50gb of data.

This external hard drive is advertised as being quiet, I wouldn't say its silent, I wouldn't say it's loud, but you can hear that it is running. Another slight problem is that it is also advertised as 320gb, but only 300gb are available to use. Others have reported this problem, but 300gb are still a great amount of space. Another thing I realised after running a benchmarking tool on my PC that the storage used inside the external hard drive case seems to be a Hitachi hard drive.

In conclusion, it is safe knowing that if my operating system needs reinstalling, I can quickly restore any files from this device in good time, without the need to backup copious amount of data to CD or DVD, or lose it all in a reinstall. I found cheaper devices with this capacity on Ebay, but they didn't have a recognised manufacturer, and through my experience with previous Freecom products, I knew I would be getting reliability. It's very easy and very quick way to add extra storage to your computer. I recommend it for backing up data that may be taking up lots of space on your PC, but its possible a bit noisy for running it all the time. I'd happily recommend this device for its storage capabilities and price, especially for anyone who needs it for the roles I mentioned above.