Freecom Portable II

Advantages: Small, easy to use, upgradable, decently priced
Disadvantages: Check - You may need 2 USB ports

...I bought one of these devices a couple of years ago and it worked excellently. I was very satisfied with the ease of use - you simply plug in the wires and away you go. No need for driver installation etc (on modern operating systems). I used it for over a year for photography and general backup with no problems at all. Essentially, the Freecom device is simply a laptop drive in a little black box. This is good because laptop hard drives are built with portability in mind. So when I wanted to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop the Freecom was easily unscrewed and upgraded too (bear in mind mine was out of warranty at this stage). ----- First Impressions ----- First impressions were good. To have all that storage space in something small and portable was great. The unit is made of metal so has a decent feel to it although I... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Small footprint, USB connectivity, good capacity, quiet
Disadvantages: All the above completely let down by the units reliability

...Please take a few seconds to rate this at the end - it helps me know if its meaningful or not and I can improve accordingly Ok... Its big...its black...it hums quietly in the corner. Oh..and its made by Freecom - a manufacturer I previously thought was pretty reliable (I have their dual layer portable DVD re-writer as well). This drive is billed as being rugged and portable - after all that is the whole point of external portable drives, isnt it? When I got the unit, it was twice as big in capacity as the HDD in my tower PC, so I immediately throught - backup. It didnt come with any back-up soft ware though, which I think is a glaring omission. No matter, I thought, I will back up my photos (10,000+), music (14,000 tracks), etc into folders I create myself. Connection simply means attaching the power cable to a free socket... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Portable, cheap
Disadvantages: uses a lot of CPU

...I bought the Freecom portable DVD-ROM drive for my laptop, which only had an internal CD ROM drive. I wanted to play DVD's and was able to do so. The drive is external, and connects to any computer via a parallell port, firexire, USB or PC card, through the PCMCIA slot of a laptop. If the PCMCIA port also has ZV (Zoomed Video) capability, it is a huge bonus. It came with an excellent driver, and software, and was easy enough to install on Windows ME (it is also supported by NT, 95, 98, XP etc). However, I did find that the picture and sound were quite jerky, and sometimes almost unwatchable. I got around this by buying a hardware MPEG II decoder card ("Dvd-to-go", from Margi systems), which sorted out the problem. But I was lucky that I happened to have 2 PCMCIA slots, as it turned out i needed both: one for the Freecom card and one... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful