Advantages: Portability, 500GB storage, Speed, Reliability, Warranty
Disadvantages: Slightly strange brown colour

..., and it will be very easy to have the drive run from a different PC if I wanted to. The offer with DABS was actually very good, in that the cost of the drive was going to be less than that for an internal 500GB SATAII drive, bargain ! I placed the order ( and I have to say, was very happy with the ordering / delivery process ) and I received the drive within 2 days. Once received, you can see that the product is very well packaged ( which is something I am very keen on, it shows that the product will be well protected during transport - not very good for us Eco-Friendly people, but the majority of packaging was cardboard containers, so its all recyclable - which is a plus ) Once you open up the box, (which also has a security seal on to show whether its been tampered with - which is also good ) you see the following FreeAgent desktop drive... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: cheap - all that it is
Disadvantages: poor structure, prone to overheating, not reliable

...Out shopping for a new external hard drive the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop caught my eye. It looked appealing with a massive 500GBs and 5 year limited warrenty as standard. I thought it was great value for money. The dimensions are (WxDxH) 4 cm x 16.2 cm x 19 cm and it is 0.9kg in weight. This product is black in colour with a yellow strip of light which is constantly on, though it isn't too bright so i had no problems there. It's Interface Type is Hi-Speed USB and has a Data Transfer Rate of 480 Mbps. Also has a Spindle Speed of 7200 rpm. These are also compatible with the following - OS Required Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Apple MacOS X 10.3.9 or later, Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple MacOS X 10.4.6 or later This all sounded promising. After getting home... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: fast, high capacity, looks good, reliable, easy to use
Disadvantages: it makes my other drives look bad

...There comes a time when you need to get an external hard drive, after all there is a limit to how many internal ones you can attach to a motherboard (varies, normally about 3). I personally use a lot of drive space, going into the terabytes, so every now and then I have to attach a new external HD. This time I bought this one, and I am quite happy with it. An important feature that the DriveStation fulfills is that it looks nice. Its more important than manufacturers often think, as first impressions are often lasting impressions - and the first impression I got from this was professional and ruthlessly efficient. The 500GB is generous considering it only cost me £100 or so, which is pretty damn good for external drives. 500GB will last me a good couple of months, then I reckon I will go and buy myself another of these beasts... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Very easy to use
Disadvantages: USB only

.... This includes basic compression and security. More importantly, NTFS uses the space on the disk much more efficiently. Warning: NTFS will only work on the latest versions of Windows. The drive has some ‘free’ software on the drive. Unfortunately, none of it helps you make backups, it’s just Google stuff (desktop, toolbar etc) and an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader. I wouldn't bother even looking at this if I were you! Delete it! Like most computer hardware, the speed is only matched by the connection to the computer. Since it uses USB 2.0, you only get USB 2.0 speeds (480Mbps), which for a 7,200rpm hard drive is quite slow, especially if you have a large capacity drive (+100gb). Firewire 800 is much faster but you’re paying for the extra speed too, so there are some questions to ask yourself before buying one of these. I noticed... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast and reliable
Disadvantages: Automatic spin-down can be annoying

...This hard drive has many things over other drives on the market. Firstly, being made by Maxtor you would be expecting something special. And I can happily say that it does outclass many of the other drives out there. It is a 7200rpm drive, and so file transfers are as quick as on an internal hard disk. While I'm on the topic of performance, there is one little issue. The drive will power itself down after a period of inactivity, which is great if you like to save energy, and probably good for the lifespan of the drive, but upon accessing the powered down drive, you'll need to wait for it to spin back up to speed again before it can be used. This can take from about 4-6 seconds, and can be slightly irritating when it keeps happening. Placing the operating system's pagefile on the disk has resolved this issue for me, as the pagefile... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast, nice design, prevents data loss and corruption
Disadvantages: slows down the start up time (unknown reason)