Hard Drives > by Manufacturer

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: 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: 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: 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

Advantages: Easy to use, easy to install, no complications, very very stable
Disadvantages: None

Existing as the cheapest external HDD in the market, WD has really sweeped the market.. A perferct combination of performance, quality and good price.. It comes in 250, 320, 500 GB and just came out with 1 TB... The prices are incomparable.. This HDD is the most stable that I have ever used.. It has curbed the most irritating problems with HDD - that is stability issues.. No complications, just plug and play.. No installation of drivers, nothing ...
...photo management (Picasa).. The best thing is that it comes as FAT32 formatted, so it can be used in all (windows, mac and linux ubuntu).. As far as speed of file transfer goes, its good as per to USB 2.0 speeds... For better speeds, go for the firewire versions.. WD has also come up with data backup versions of the same.. I havent had a single problem with the HDD.. I would suggest this to everyone.. Take my word for it, it is the best available ... Read review