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 this i think their customer services are pretty good, yeh they could have given me my £11.00 back but i gained a much better hard drive for £11.00. I use this hard drive on a Mac, because of this i have not bothered with the one touch backup button or timed backup button but to be honest i do not want all of my hard drive backed up... 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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Advantages: Quick transfer speed,
Disadvantages: Fairly Bulky

...What can i say this is an internal had-drive which obviously integrates within a computer system. Nowadays 80GB is not enough for anyone as programs are now increasing in size due to their complexity and what they have to offer. A hard drive is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Non-volatile storage is simply the name given to a storage device which can retain stored data even when not powered. With a volatile storage device being one that can not retain saved data e.g. RAM (Random Access Memory). I used to have an 80 GB hard drive in the past on my "OLD" PC, which was about 5 years ago. Now i have a 300 GB hard drive which i have to admit is filling up really quickly. Due to the number of files stored e.g music, photo, video etc. This particular... Read review

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Advantages: Great invention, reasonable price, large capacity
Disadvantages: Bulky, noisy

...is approx. 3.5 inches in height, 10 inches across and 3.5 inches deep. When it is running it is also has quite a loud buzzing noise, which can be quite tedious. The hard drive has 120GB and can store approx. 2,000 hours of digital music, 38,400 digital photos, 120 hours of digital video or 60 PC games. You are able to store digtal photos, videos, music, DVD's, Business Documents and Emails on the hard drive. The hard drive has a 7200-RPM spin speed and a 2-MB cache buffer, BounceBack Express software for fast and easy back up, built-in self-monitoring technology and is also compatible with Windows and Macintosh platforms. I have found this hard drive really useful, no longer does my laptop get filled up, it also runs faster. I am able to store all large documents/music/games on the external hard drive which prevents the slow... Read review

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Advantages: Large and fast removable storage.
Disadvantages: Can get a bit warm during operation.

...to a mains AC-DC adaptor with voltage selector so I can control the fan speed) to keep the drive much closer to room temperature. Considering how a lot of hardware failures can be attributed to heat, I want to keep my drive cool so it doesn't die a premature death. **Operating System Notes:** Now I've only used this drive on Windows XP so can't comment on other operating systems, but in purchasing this (or any other hard drive greater than 160 GB), you should probably be aware of a couple of things: 1) Your computer must support drives larger than 160 GB in its bios (any computer less than 3 years old is probably fine and often there are bios updates available from the motherboard manufacturer to provide compatibility). If your computer can only "see" the first 160 GB of the drive, this is probably the problem (and you risk corrupting... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Size, looks, no sound
Disadvantages: Could have a carrying pouch

...After filling up my 160GB laptop hard drive and hearing stories of how people have lost all of their data because of a computer crash i thought it was time to by a removable hard drive to not only back-up my files but also transfer some of the older ones. After much research i chose this Freecom model as opposed to a western digital one which was not only more expensive but apparently also broke down very easily. Only costing £49.99 from Amazon this seemed like a good deal and a brilliant aquisition for university. Portability; Being only 132x83x18mm and weighing 300 grams this hard drive is small and light enough to transport anywhere with you in a bag or even in your pocket. this size is expected for its capacity but you can also get ones with a greater capacity but is the same size. The only poor lack of detail... Read review

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