Hard Drives

Advantages: Fast, nice design, prevents data loss and corruption
Disadvantages: slows down the start up time (unknown reason)

General Western Digital specialises in producing external hard drives therefore their products are of good quality. The My Book Essential offers 500Gb which is more than enough for a standard user (Family usage). You can back up your pictures, videos, documents and programs without running out of space. Design The HD has a slick design and the shape of a book; it is small however not small enough to be a portable hard drive. But this ...
...buying this HD think of it as your home HD. Performace It is fast and reacts accoring to the computer - when system is being shut down the external HHD shuts down as well. Data stored on the drive is really secure; it happened more than once that my mate unplugged the drive while being used - still no loss or corruption of data (very good!). With 7200rpm there is no delay when playing music or games from your hard drive. More Offers ... Read review

Advantages: fast, spacious and very quiet
Disadvantages: none really...

...the drive that contains some Freecom software but I haven't used it yet. Within minutes of installing the drive I was transferring over 300GB of data to it and in use I have found the drive to be almost silent, even when transferring gigabytes of data you can only just about hear the drive running and the transfer rates seem excellent for a USB drive (although I haven't actually checked what the rates actually are). The casing does get a little warm ...
...would recommend it without hesitation. I have had several external drives over the years and currently also have a WD MyBook 500Gb external drive but I would easily recommend this drive over the MyBook because I have found the Freecom to be quieter, faster, cooler in use and better looking. ... Read review

Advantages: Small, stylish and fast
Disadvantages: None really

I bought it on amazon.co.uk in March 2007. At least at the time, it was the cheapest reseller I managed to find. I'm very happy with the drive. If you just need to keep it at home and never carry it around, you'll be better off with a drive that requires external power: they tend to be bulkier but faster and cheaper. If instead you need to carry it around, this is the perfect choice: USB-powered, small and stylish. About as big as 2 passports, ... Read review

Advantages: High speed transfer, power consumption low, quiet
Disadvantages: usual HDD shock issues

The Hitachi TravelStar is the newly developed model from Hitachi Co. specifically designed for notebooks. It varies in storage capacity, but the important factors are: the rotation speed of 7200 RPM, S-ATA 1.5 GB/s interface, and what Hitachi says "a 22% performance increase". Let's see what are the improvements: -Having tested the model you get a random access time of 14ms which is extremely faster than it's predecessor and it's competitors; ...
...wow-it's very fast) -It's almost noiseless, you get a 42dB/A idle noise at 3mm distance from the HDD; -and it's power consumption was reduced(in full load it uses 3W and in idle mode only 1.1W), which means it is very economical. -the price is in reach; I think this motivates you in at least trying one ... Read review

Advantages: The size, the look, everything
Disadvantages: price a bit hefty

...pleasure of using it at my girlfriend's house. This is a very cool and compact metal-cased storage device that works as well as you would expect from Western Digital, which means phenomenal performance at a great price. Design Its presented in a big box, and I was very relieved (and also surprised) to see how small it actually is! At 8cm in width, by 1.5 in height and 13 cm in depth, the passport fails to take up much space on your desk or on top ...
...Vista. I moved all of my games and some music files to the hard disk, along with backups of university work, and photos (the 3 rules of computing are back up, back up, back up!). Performance It transfers at a rate of 480 Mbps which in practise turned out to be surprisingly fast. Access time was very quick, 12ms per second seek time, so within the hour i had backed up and transferred my files!. I have had no trouble streaming games and movies from ... Read review