Many thanks for the welcomes to Ciao! and all comments so far. I am very pleasantly surprised by the...
Many thanks for the welcomes to Ciao! and all comments so far. I am very pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of folk around here :)
I am a graduate physicist but with a strong creative side for video editing, DVD authoring and graphic design.
Member since:21.11.2005
Reviews:12
I have owned this drive for a few months and have found it to be excellent. But I disagree with a previous review in several areas.
This is the most stylish external hard drive I have seen. It is also one of the cheapest per GB, currently available for just £93 at Misco.co.uk, for example.
It works with Macs and PCs and is almost silent. It comes with a USB cable and a driver CD for old Windows operating systems. The external design is superb minimalism and looks like it could have been designed by Apple themselves. The case is all aluminium except the front and back. The front face is black except for the capacity indicator of ‘500GB’ which lights up in blue and flickers during activity. The rear has the power and USB ports and a small power switch.
The 500GB box value translates to 465GB under Windows due to the differing ways the drive manufacturers and Windows measure storage capacities. Note this is normal and true of all hard drives, so it is not a drawback here.
As one would expect, plug the drive in and it appears as a removable drive like any other. No set up as such, though for dealing with large files especially, I would reformat the drive with the NTFS file system immediately, which is easy to do under Windows. I don’t know why drives like this are not formatted as NTFS to start with.
Today, writing a file of 3 GB to the drive took less than two minutes giving an average write speed of 26 MB/s (208 Mbps). Copying the file back again gave the same read speed. I regard this to be very good for an external drive. While transfer speed depends on many things and my experience is just an example, it does demonstrate the minimum capability of the drive. Note that transferring many small files tends to give a lower overall speed.
I must disagree with a previous review and say that the drive can get quite warm since it has no fan and uses the aluminium case as a heat sink. This is certainly nothing to worry about and is preferable to having a small noisy fan on the drive.
Another point is that the plug is a perfectly normal one and so I do not think it is a problem with any sockets. The short mains lead plugs into a very small power adapter, smaller than any laptop’s I have seen, and then there is a longer, thin, low voltage wire which goes to the drive. I think this design is good. I have seen a similar Seagate drive which, quite apart from the drive being very ugly, has a much larger power adapter.
The only minor drawback for me is that the activity light does not change brightness much when the drive is active (reading or writing). This, coupled with its near silence, means it is difficult to tell if the drive is working by just looking at it.
Overall, this is an excellent drive for extra storage or backup. Assuming all goes well in the meantime, I would be happy to buy another one in the future when I require more space.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
I wasn't saying different experiences are incorrect - I believed what you wrote. I disagreed because I had found different things. I certainly wasn't trying to say you were a liar. I'm beginning to suspect we're talking about different products or at least slightly different versions of a product...
sghawken 20.05.2007 23:15
For anyone uncertain as to why my comment lies below in this way, this is due to the reviewer siting my experiences of the product as being incorrect, just because my experiences and his differed. Just because my experiences are different, does not make me less capable of reviewing a product, and certainly not as you have implied a liar, whom fills their reviews with pointless information!
sghawken 20.05.2007 22:51
Rather like you, I found your review a stark contrast from the my experience. I also found that you spent too much time baffling people with what they might not understand. Remember not everyone that uses this site has the same experiences, or understands technical jargon!
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