Hard Drives > Less than 150 GB Hard Drives > IEEE 1394 (FireWire) / Hi-Speed USB

Advantages: Good Looking, Robust
Disadvantages: Scratch Easily, Heavy

External Hard Drives need to be portable, reliable, no-fuss, and styled by car designers. Ok, the latter is untrue, but maybe all hard disks should! I'd sure like to see a Morris Minor portable solution, or a Robin Reliant mobile hard disk. Jokes aside, the unit IS rather attractive. Its housing is rather svelt and sleek, blending in subtley with your computing array. After purchasing various Mac products throughout the academic year 05/06, the brushed ...
...Please don't put me down as some computer-fashion authority though, it was simply the best FireWire-interfaced drive I could afford on a stringent budget of £65 back in September 05! The drive has four rubber feet that keep the housing protected from surface scratches, or should I say "had". After only a few days, two of the feet fell off at the back. One went bouncing off under a desk never to be seen again and the other is now super-glued to the ... Read review

Advantages: SLIM, LOADS OF MEMORY, RELIABLE
Disadvantages: NEED A SPARE USB PORT ON YOUR COMPUTER

...I just knew that the LaCie Mobile Hard Drive was the perfect drive for me to save my files. Yes saved and backed up safley. The great thing is you just have to plug in the hard drive into your pc via the usb port and you are ready to go. No software or drivers to install. I have never gone back to using DVDs or CDs to backup anything. Another thing I used to have loads of CDS DVDS scattered around the room. I have now thrown them away... WOW 120GB ... Read review

Advantages: Lightweight, Slim, Auto-sync
Disadvantages: Shame there isn't a higher capacity

This Freecom External Hard Drive is a 2.5" Hard Drive that has a USB interface and uses your computer's bus power to power itself. This means that an AC adapter is not required. With so few of these truly bus powered drives around, this is one of the best, followed closely by the Lacie bus powered drive. Thsi drive is ideal for laptop users who travel with a lot of data, or for those going on holiday with laptops who want to take their mp3's, movies ...
...extra megabytes of space. Freecom have also included their auto-sync software, allowing you to update your files on the external drive with those on the computer's hard drive and vice versa. To do this, you just install the software on the computer, set up with directoroes/files you want to keep updated and then press the button on the drive. It only takes a few seconds, a few mins at most for very large files and it's done. The drive does NOT require ... Read review

Advantages: Very portable, Easy to Use
Disadvantages: Extra plug socket needed

...also a CD of the Iomega Backup software, which is a very powerful program, which allows you to mirror any Hard Drive, Partition or even Folder and File on to the External. This software is so useful that we have now purchased another 4 of these units and use them as our main means of Data Backup for both Offices. The drives that we have are connected using the USB ports, but they can also be connected through a Firewire port, with both cables included ...
...though, is that if you connect it using a USB 1.1 port, the drives are quite slow, with a supposed transfer rate of 12 MB/s, which can take a long time to transfer large amounts of data. However, if you connect through a USB 2.0 port, things are dramatically different, transfering data at 60 MB/s, making it behave virtually like a normal internal disk. As to the physical size of the thing, it measures 28.45 x 21.59 x 25.40 cm, so we have all of ... Read review

Advantages: The Funky Coloured lights and simple plug-in access
Disadvantages: No Switch to turn lights off.

This was a must i love all things that light up and this is just what i was looking for. I have a wireless router which allows me to connect a USB 2.0 Drive to it and use it as a SAN (or network work drive) because i have the router system on 24/7 i also have this drive pretty much on all the time as well for the on-demand access. The drive has a very quite operating noise really beacoming slightly louder when accessing the drive. The simplististy ...
...a few seconds for Windows XP to detect the drive and hey presto their is a new drive in my computer drag and dropping files within explorer or other programs is a brezee. The whole ethos for this drive is that the consumer plugs it in either a usb compatable router or standard p.c. or laptop, and the device does the rest of the setup automatically. This size is perfect for a family with modist data needs or a single person. The drive accepts both ... Read review