IBM Hard drive 73.4 GB

Advantages: Quite a fast drive.
Disadvantages: One of the "Deathstar" drives.

...complaining about their IBM drives dying. I even had a friend with a 60 GB model whose drive died after only a year. Possibly I'm lucky my drive hasn't died yet, but also there could be a reason for it.... These models of drive, marketed by IBM as "Deskstar", soon earnt the nickname "Deathstar" on many a website. With seemingly many people's replacement drives also dying and people generally getting very annoyed that IBM had turned out rather a dodgy lot of hard disks. A year ago IBM released a firmware update that's supposed to fix the cause of the failures, which was to do with the way the hard drive head idled. The firmware fix simply moves the head around every now and again to prevent the problem (now my hard drive might have survived because it's accessing the disk so often). I'm sure a lot of people don't know there was a firmware update... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Light and cheap
Disadvantages: Low battery run time

...The sony Vaio labtop is a state of the art labtop and comes at a very good price, the labtop is very light (3.1 kg) and can be used for bussiness or personel use, , the labtop has a 15.4 screen, 1.73 GHz and a core duo, The battery run time is 3.8 hours, A notebook - ram:1 GB - DVD R, Built in devices - Stereo speakers and wireless LAN aerial and Hard Drive: 120 GB - Serial ATA-150, microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium and is a very good labtop with a really good price range, Type: Keyboard, touchpad, Video Graphics Processor / Vendor: Intel GMA 950 Video Memory: Dynamic Video Memory Technology 3.0 Max Allocated RAM Size: 224 MB, Audio output sound card, I myself would recemonned that you buy this labtop. Thank you for reading this review.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Performance, reliability, price
Disadvantages: Can be hard to set up, noisy

...This drive has an excellent spec. 2MB Buffer, 7200RPM, UDMA100 and 8.5 sec access speed, which is the fastest I have seen of an IDE drive! On top of this, it is also one of the cheaper drives available. However, I must warn you of a couple of niggles I have with this product. First, while simply spinning it is very quiet. However when it is being accessed it is rather more noisy. My ancient Fujitsu 6.4G was quieter, and most other modern drives are quieter still. Second, the jumper settings are rather hard to understand. If you plan on using this drive as a master, don't worry, because it is set to this by default. However, if you wish to use it as a slave, then good luck! I could only get it to work as a slave on the secondary IDE channel, which is pretty useless. The "cable select" setting, which is supposed to choose the master... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful