Hard Drives > From 200 GB to 300 GB Hard Drives > External hard drive > 120 GBP to 180 GBP

Advantages: Size, ease of use
Disadvantages: could be faster on new models if had e-SATA

To start this drive looks good and feels heavy which gives an immediate impression of sound quality. There is an instruction manual on provided disc. Its 190 x 110 x 35 mm in size, so small enough to tuck away out of sight, although it's best to give adequate ventilation whilst running as it's passively cooled (no fan - near silent). If using as a backup device you will need to install Silverlining 98 from the mentioned disc, or use your own software. ...
...Windows/Linux/Mac as it's seen as just another drive, so backups can be done without software (remember that this is not incremental though). If your computer allows boot from USB (check bios settings) you can use this device to boot from. I've successfully managed to boot Linux from it through a preinstalled Windows laptop, and it runs at a good speed. Overall transfer speed is as good as you can get with USB2 (around 400mbps). The drive needs formatting ... Read review

Advantages: Quite cool good capacity
Disadvantages: Poor reliablity

This product is a bit of a double edged sword. The down side is that my second one of these has just failed after returning my orgional to the supplier after a Harddrive failure, the same has just happened. the Drive is quite bulky, however this does not have much on an impact. The plus points. Everything you need comes in the box, power supply usb cables extra. Its is very stright forward to use, plug all the relavet cables in, switch it on and ...
...have partitioned mine 50/50 with NTFS and FAT32, so i can keep very large work files and use it with my PS3. The formatting process was no different to any other Harddrive. It is relativly quite, runs fairly cool and generally gives good transfer speeds. there have never been any bad sectors on either drive, when i have run scandisk. The only problems i have unfortunatly have been a total cease of usage, on the first occasion the harddrive itself ... Read review

Advantages: Fast with large files, quiet fast with small files, quiet, doesn't struggle with large files.
Disadvantages: May need defragging alot.

I have this drive pre installed in my computer and the first thing i realised was that it was extremely FAST; i had tested the drive on a hard drive benchmarking program called 'HDTach'. This is as on my HP'm7635', using this drive i got a burst speed of 210 MB/s and a average read rate of 70MB/s; both are extremely fast. I also realised that this drive was extremely quiet; being installed in my media cennter PC it wasn't exactly a suprise though. ...
...the context of everyday computng this hard drive is very fast, windows loads up very quickly. You can force large files down the hard drive and it wont struggle; though i still recommend that you defragmentate the drive on a regular basis for optimal speed. To expand on my statement of what fast is, i mean to say that the drive is able to handle copying of large files such as movies very quickly. The drive is also fast in seeking files from a random ... Read review

Advantages: 120GB, Good price, Extremely easy to use.
Disadvantages: Takes up 2 USB slots.

...drive also comes with some Maxtor software designed to ease back-up and synching of data. For this purpose I would recommend just downloading Microsoft's SynchToy which is available as a free download and in my opinion is more powerful and easier to use than the software that comes with the drive. Another useful feature of the included software is the ability to encrypt and password-protect the data on the drive. I would definitely recommend this ... Read review

Advantages: 250GB of internal memory!! At a reasonable price, too!
Disadvantages: No major disadvantages. Not as quiet as I believed it would be.

...low, this 250GB drive from Western Digital was the highest capacity ATA internal drive I could find at a reasonable price, and so far it has not let me down! It took a bit of effort to clone my original hard drive to the new one, which required the purchase of an external hard drive enclosure, but once the process was completed, I simply removed my old hard drive, insterted the new one and was ready to go! And now I have my old 60GB drive in the ...
...has gone to waste in the upgrade! The drive has been completely reliable and performs exactly as expected. The only slight quibble I have is that despite the manufacturer's claim that it is one of the quietest drives around, it is slightly louder than my old one. Regardless of this however, it is still pretty quiet and the noise level is not a problem even when left on at night. All in all I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking to upgrade ... Read review