IBM Hard drive 73.4 GB

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

...to start 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... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, high capacity storage. Well built, looks good. 2 year warranty, No fan.
Disadvantages: No fan.

...Freecom before as they've always looked a bit cheap and nasty so this would be an interesting experience. The box did feel reassuringly heavy though, a good start. ############### # What's in the Box? ############### Apart from the drive, the box contained a small light external PSU, a USB lead and a CD with some backup software. The case is made of extremly solid and heavy aluminium with a silver plastic front piece with a sexy blue '400GB' light (yes, you can have sexy lights. Really.) at the front just to prove how big it was. The finish is excellent and I have to say, if this is anything to go by, I'm converted to Freecom. Unlike the picture here, my unit has the aluminium finished in matt black which looks really nice on top of my black PC. It's also surprisingly compact - not that much bigger than a hard drive at 20x11.5x4 cms... Read review

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Advantages: Lots of space for all your gaming needs.
Disadvantages: Price, Dust, Missing GB

...My personal experience with the Xbox 360 hard drive has been fairly positive. The ability to store music, films, videos and of course games saves is one that no Xbox gamer should be without. 120 GB of memory is more than enough for the average gamer. The hard drive is well designed to blend with the console perfectly. It is small and easy to store. However the price is pretty heavy compared to the cheaper 20GB versions. A problem with the memory is the fact that the hard drive does not actually have 120GB, obviously it wouldn't be exactly due to the need for the running files but several GB are actually missing. Regular cleaning is advised as dust tends to collect on the hard drive but a sharp blow into the docking port is sufficient to clear this. All in all this product is an incredibly useful addition to any Xbox 360 gamers... Read review

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