Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Plug and Play . Not expensive . Can be moved between different computers |
| Disadvantages: |
Not a lot ! |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
~ ~ One thing you can never have enough of on your home or business computer is storage space.
~ ~ Back at the end of November 2005 I upgraded my old computer that I'd had since about 2000 and which was beginning to show its age and lack of performance very badly, and treated myself to a new top-of-the-range custom built computer from a manufacturer on eBay. Included in my specification was a 200Gb SATA hard drive, and along with the 80Gb hard drive which I transplanted from my old computer I thought this would give me more than enough storage capacity for all our family computer needs, both personal and business.
How wrong can you be! Over the last couple of months I've found my hard drive capacity becoming smaller and smaller. First of there was the fact that with my new fast computer and Broadband connection I was now able, for the first time, to successfully download music and movies from the Web. Combine this with a teenage daughter with a new Creative Muto MP3 player from Santa and a totally insatiable appetite for downloading hundreds of songs, computer games, and movies from a P2P site where I'm a member, and suddenly that 280Gb hard drive capacity didn't look so adequate after all! The movie files in particular take up endless Gigabytes of space.
~ ~ I was in the process of hunting around eBay with a view to purchasing yet another internal hard drive when an insert from PC World (the high street
computer store) happened to fall from my copy of the newspaper one morning just before Christmas. A New Year sale which (of course) didn't start in the New Year but on the 26th December.
One of their offers was a selection of external hard drives from a company called
Freecom, and at great prices. One drive in particular caught my eye. An 80Gb external hard drive for only €84.99. A quick browse both here and at eBay showed that Freecom were an established and respected manufacturer, and that the price was about as low as I was going to get, taking into account the higher postage and packing charges I have to always pay when buying an item from the UK. So on St. Stephen's Day morning I was camped at the door of the local PC World
store when they opened their doors at 10AM, and bought myself two of these excellent drives. (One for myself, and another for a present)
~ ~ So what attracted me to the external hard drive in preference to another internal hard drive?
The first thing was the fact that the drive is fully portable. I now have an eBay shop of my own, where I sell a large selection of oil paintings and fine art prints, and which (I'm happy to say) is going from strength to strength. I have a home framing workshop at the top of our garden where I do all my framing work, and this year it's my intention to install my old PC here as a purely business computer using a wireless connection to the Internet. This will save me from having to constantly be running backwards and forwards from my workshop to my main PC in my study in the house in order to access information I require. With the Freecom portable hard drive all I have to do is simply "cut and paste" or "copy and paste" all my business files from the internal hard drives on my main PC to the Freecom drive, and then plug it into a USB2 port on my old computer, and I'm up and running.
Another factor that attracted me to the external drive was its ease of use. It really is practically "plug and play". You load in the software from the CD you get with the drive, plug it into any available USB2 (or 1.1) port on your computer, turn on the power, and that's it installed. No messing about with complicated set-up procedures designed to send you screaming to the nearest available psychiatrist, and nice and simple for a person like me who's technical ability just about stretches to changing a light bulb!
It's also very small in size, measuring approximately 8" x 6", and so sits comfortably on top of my main computer case. My drive is in silver, which also matches the colour of my main case, but I'm sure it's also available in black and other colours.
~ ~ We currently use the drive to store all our "media" files. In other words, all the music, games and movies we have installed on the computer or which we download from the Internet. It's
ideal for this purpose, especially as I delete any music and movie files as soon as I've burnt them onto a CD or DVD.
The drive could also be used very successfully to back up any important files you wanted to protect in case your computer ever crashed and you lost some vital information. Or it could equally be used as a "portable" drive, so you could pack it into your luggage and take any important business files with you and then access them either on your laptop or any other PC when you reached your destination.
~ ~ I'm not going to go into all the technical specifications here in this review as they are easily obtainable by either looking at the technical specs for the product here on Ciao, or by doing a Google search of the product. There are only one or two that are worth mentioning.
Your computer must be running on Windows platform of Windows 98 or higher, have at least a Pentium 2 processor with a speed of not less than 233 MHz, and at least 64 Mb of RAM. Of course, you'll also need a CD Rom drive in order to install the software, and it's handy if you have an Internet connection in case you need to download any new or updated drivers from the Freecom website, or need any further technical support from their online help desk.
~ ~ The drive comes packaged with all you'll need to get you up and running within minutes, including a USB cable to connect it to your computer. As I already mentioned earlier, I paid €84.99 (£58.44 Sterling) for the drive in the PC World sale. As always, it's best to shop around on the Web or here at Ciao for the best
price available.
Highly recommended by the mad cabbie.
© KenJ January 2005
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