Advantages: Fast and Silent, Easy SATA installation, Two flavours to choose from
Disadvantages: Dismal performance

...Maxtor are one of the 3 leading hard drive manufacturers in the personal and business computing market at the moment along with Western Digital and Hitachi. They are also the cheapest. Unfortunately, the saying that price doesn't equals quality is true here. Too true. The 160GB version of the DiamondMax Plus9 can be purchased online from around £51.00 onwards. And with the way hard drive prices have fallen recently, that's not bad at all. But as I said, you're getting cheap quality to match the cheap price. The drive itself looks very similar to any other hard drive, and comes in both IDE ATA/133 and SATA 150 flavours, with the SATA ones easier to configure due to their jumperless installations. My personal experience with this drive has been short. I first purchased this drive to use in my first ever custom-built computer... Read review

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Advantages: Plug and Play, Really Fast Doesn't Overheat
Disadvantages: Nothing =D

...Freecom External 3.5" 160GB Hard Drive I first got the Freecom external hard 160GB hard drive when my internal one on my computer started to get clogged up with applications and other junk. So I decided to go and buy a Freecom external hard drive which is 160 Gigabytes in size. Since this hard drive is external, it does have to look good and not look like a tack bit of plastic with wires hanging out of it. With Freecom though, performance and design is everything. The hard drive enclosure itself is made of high quality, heat absorbing aluminium which is 20 x 11.5 x 4.5 cm ( or 7.9 x 4.5 x 1.6 inches ) in size. On the front of the hard drive enclosure is a storage LED indicator and on the back there is one ' rocker' power on/off switch, a usb port and a power adapter port. This hard drive has been givin five awards including... Read review

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Advantages: Huge capacity, reasonably fast, 5 year warranty
Disadvantages: Not the fastest

...My laptop, a Dell 5150 is a fine machine (see review elsewhere on Ciao) but the 80Gb hard drive whilst big for a laptop is starting to get a bit cramped now I have both Windows XP and Vista on it so I've started looking around for a second hard drive so I can put Vista on one and leave XP on the other and then swap drives as needed. Luckily, following a previous hard drive failure, I have a spare caddy that the laptop needs so swapping drives would be a quick task, assuming I keep the tiny screwdriver needed handy in my rucksack! Laptop hard drives are smaller than normal - 2.5inch as opposed to 3.5 inch and tend to be at a price premium compared to the 'normal' sized drives, especially the bigger ones. They also tend to be much slower as they run at 4200RPM instead of 5600 or even 7200RPM that desktop ones run at. The reason being... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable
Disadvantages: Non

...First of all, I did not buy this hard drive. I had a cheaper Western Digital Hard drive but it broke. Lucky it was still in the warranty so i went to the post office.....to my horror it was £11.00 to send as i think it was going to germany. I thought this was awful as i had paid for the thing. I waited about a week and it was returned to me, apart from it was not the item i had sent to them. Because of my trouble they sent me a much better hard drive with about 50gb more than my old one. Because of thi