Maxtor Basics Desktop 250 GB

...onto the specifics of the Maxtor brand, they've got a reasonable reputation for reliability and I'd consider them trustworthy, although backups are still essential whatever you use. The 7200rpm spin speed gives slightly faster reads than older 5400rpm drives but is pretty standard across the board now. 8MB buffer RAM is adequate for a drive of this size. At over 1kg in weight it's luggable but not exactly portable. It does feature a shock protection ...
...recommend treating it like a crystal vase whenever you carry it around.

At 250GB this is a relatively small capacity drive by current standards but it should be more than adequate unless you've got a truly enormous amount of video files or have something else that takes up a lot of space. There are drives of the same physical size up to 1.5TB in the same range if you need that and are prepared to pay for it. There are also plenty of ... more

I'm sure we've all manged to fill up our computer hard drive at least once and it's easier said than done to trawl through all your files to find out which once you don't really need to keep, so why not buy yourself some time by adding an external drive. Alternative uses include backing up your files and transferring large files between machines where no network is available.

They're very easy to use; just plug one in and Windows should recognize it automatically. You shouldn't need to install any extra drives or format it unless your requirements are particularly exacting; they're also compatible with Apple hardware out of the box. With USB 2.0 it's also fairly quick; not as good as an internal SATA drive but, again, unless you're doing something particularly exacting you're unlikely to notice much in the way of a slowdown.

Getting onto the specifics of the Maxtor brand, they've got a reasonable reputation for reliability and I'd consider them trustworthy, although backups are still essential whatever you use. The 7200rpm spin speed gives slightly faster reads than older 5400rpm drives but is pretty standard across the board now. 8MB buffer RAM is adequate for a drive of this size. At over 1kg in weight it's luggable but not exactly portable. It does feature a shock protection system, so might survive an occasional bump, but I'd still recommend treating it like a crystal vase whenever you carry it around.

At 250GB this is a relatively small capacity drive by current standards but it should be more than adequate unless you've got a truly enormous amount of video files or have something else that takes up a lot of space. There are drives of the same physical size up to 1.5TB in the same range if you need that and are prepared to pay for it. There are also plenty of smaller drives that offer similar capacities if you're going to have to cart it around with a laptop, although be warned as many are less robust and may fail if shaken or dropped.
 

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