Drives > External Drives

Advantages: Small, adequate capacity and very versatile
Disadvantages: gets scratched easily

This little gadget solved a problem that I had. Some of my lectures for medical school are very large files to download, and I only have a phone line in my digs. However the computers in the uni computer labs have a very quick connection. So how do I get info from one computer to another. Firstly, I tried CDR. However, this is tedious, I always forgot to take the disc, and it takes time. To top it off, I have a Mac, and the compatibility was not ...
...had heard about portable flash drives. I had looked at some a few months ago, but decided against them on the fact that the brand names were very expensive, and the ones I saw were not well designed. Then I found this baby in Micro Anvika for £55, which is little more than a generic one, with the bonus that this supports USB 2, with much faster transfer rates if I ever find a computer with the tech. All I have to do is pop off the cap, and plug ... Read review

Advantages: Speed, hotpluggable, price
Disadvantages: Noise of fan

I bought this product about a year ago. It is the 20GB version which can be purchased for around £199. I run it from a Power Mac G4 through Firewire. But you can run it from any computer that has firewire. It is a great drive. I think it looks good. Useability is excellent, for the mac all you have to do is install the firewire drivers and bingo it works. It is hot pluggable which means you don't have to restart your computer to mount it. You ...
...When you have finished you unmoount it and turn it off. Performance wise it is good, much faster than USB it can transfer about 20mb per sec providing your computer can keep up. Though you have to remember that this is not true firewire. It is a normal EIDE hardisk with a firewire bridge. Compared to all the other Firewire drives out there .. all the reviews I have read all say this is the fastest in their tests apart from the VST drive. But that ... Read review

Advantages: Really good looking
Disadvantages: Technical help assumes a level of knowledge I don't have

...3 cds became coasters)! Iomega have a very useful service on their website where you can instant message their technical help department. I did this after the 3rd cd, and was given lots of very complicated advice, including shutting down my antivirus software, deleting files, and going into windows config and messing about! I didn't understand any of it! However, there is an easy answer. I simply do all my cds with the 'test and create' option, ... Read review

Advantages: Very, very cheap; SATA; Fast; Reads/Writes most DVD formats
Disadvantages: Only comes in beige; No DVD-RAM writing (Read Only)

...REVIEW I bought my Pioneer DVR-212D, a few days ago for just £11 inc. VAT, BRAND NEW, from eBuyer.com. I hope you agree that's an incredible price for a S-ATA DVD rewriter. I only really needed the Pioneer drive to aid in testing the functionality of another more current P-ATA DVD-RW drive that was exhibiting some very odd behaviour that I wasn't absolutely certain was the drive's fault, so I wasn't too fussy about it being highly specified. Having ...
...the drive vertically. Being Pioneer I imagine longevity is a given, at least here in my household they have an enviable reputation for reliability. I have never managed to break anything I have bought from them in the past. It doesn't seem to matter what quality of disc you present it with either, it just accepts any old tat. Even the really nasty 8x reject DVDs my local computer emporium tries to pass of as quality gear work in this drive, a welcome ... Read review

Advantages: ummmmm
Disadvantages: Doesn't work very well, slow, intermitently recognises disks, poor back up service, need I go on?

I ordered my Freecom DVD Recorder LS USB 2.0 after my CD/DVD drive packed up on my 15 month old HP Desktop. I wanted it mainly to load CD ROM and burn DVD's from movies already converted to DVD format on my hard drive. Being that my PC had no disk drive I relied upon this external drive to load the bundled DVD burning software (Roxio 9). This took several days and many attempts. Then I tried burning my first DVD. After taking 3 hours to do a task ... Read review