Hitachi CinemaStar 7K500 250 GB

Advantages: Easy setup, Reliable
Disadvantages: Perhaps a little noisey

...Nice product, got mine for £45 being a oem drive so no cabels were supplied etc .... It was easy to install format and partition with no problems, windows recognised the full size straight away, Jumper setting guide is on the drive an easy to follow, I use mine as my second drive with windows being installed on another but im always swapping files to and from drives and all my downloads go to the Hitachi and so far no errors, corruptions or anything of the sort, Speed seems reasonable transfers a 5Gb movie in about 2 mins with other things going on in the background all in all it seems very reliable the only complaint i would have is it does tend to get a little noisey at times but only a little and not as loud as my maxtor... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Perfect
Disadvantages: None

...Excellent Hard Drive. I used to have a Maxtor 40Gb hard drive and after getting broadband I realised I needed much more capacity. I decided to go for an Hitachi/IBM Drive because I work in IT industry and I am particularly involved in mainframes and I am aware that Hitachi are extremely rigorous when it comes to releasing new drives, for a new type of drive to be released by Hitachi it has to survive in a mainframe environment. Hitachi has an extremely good reliability rate at mainframe level. Hitachi have used the latest technology to ensure that their drives maintain good reliability like a Head Load/Unload system which means that the drive will not wear itself out when not in operation. In comparison to other 7200rpm drives the Deskstar come out on top in terms of its seek time, which allows faster access to data. It also... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Fast, Sata, Quite Cheap, Reliable
Disadvantages: Have to use Hitachi Software to Enable Sata II

...have to use Hitachi Feature Tools within windows, this is available from the Hitachi website and is easy enough but is just a added nuisance really. Once you have done this though the drive really flies along with speeds of about 130Mbps. The drive is also very unobtrusive sound wise, you can barely hear it clicking away in the background if you install it tightly. If your looking for something that's good for storing all of your files and fast enough to run games off that not going to break the bank this is really the drive to go for. If your looking for something that's just really for games have a look at the Western Digital Raptor X series with 10,000 Rpm and 74Gb of Storage but these retail at about £150 or so, I personally would go for the Hitachi over the Raptor because of it's superior reliability and more data storage. This comes... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful