Advantages: Easy installation, looks good, ease of use
Disadvantages: None found

...I've bought two of these drives now and am very impressed. On opening the box you'll find the following: The drive itself, power supply, USB cable and an instruction leaflet. The drive feels solid and well built, although the aluminium case does have some sharp edges near the front where it joins the plastic bezel. The drive comes formatted to FAT32, but this is easily changed to NTFS. Being a curious sort, I took one apart to find out the manufacturer of the actual drive inside and was happy to find a Seagate Barracuda, not the bottom of the range drive I was expecting! Installation under Windows XP/Vista is a doddle, just plug in the power cable, plug in the USB cable, switch it on and it's automatically detected and ready to go. In use, both drives have proved very reliable, and although transfer speeds over USB... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

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: Fast, super-stylish and near-silent.
Disadvantages: Difficult to detect activity.

...I have owned this drive for a few months and have found it to be excellent. But I disagree with a previous review in several areas. This is the most stylish external hard drive I have seen. It is also one of the cheapest per GB, currently available for just £93 at Misco.co.uk, for example. It works with Macs and PCs and is almost silent. It comes with a USB cable and a driver CD for old Windows operating systems. The external design is superb minimalism and looks like it could have been designed by Apple themselves. The case is all aluminium except the front and back. The front face is black except for the capacity indicator of ‘500GB’ which lights up in blue and flickers during activity. The rear has the power and USB ports and a small power switch. The 500GB box value translates to 465GB under Windows due to the differing ways... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast, Reliable, big capacity & amazing value for money!
Disadvantages: Doesn't look like it would take too many heavey knocks

...This is a pretty standard USB HD but with a whopping 500GB for under £100 it is amazing value for money. So far I've had no problems with it. I run mostly audio/graphics from it (which is very demanding). This HD has no problems dealing with the big files I Use, providing an excellent transfer rate. It is pretty quiet, the only noise it ever makes is a slight hum! I carry this every where I go with my laptop, it's taken a few knocks and survived OK, but I wouldn't want to test it too much, as the case doesn't look like it would protect the drive too well! The design is pretty funky and its size isn't too big either! I've had big portable drives before which were a pain to transport! this fits into my laptop bag perfectly! This drive is well worth the buy.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Maximizes the amount of data vs the cost of the product
Disadvantages: heat issues, cord connectivity, and small installation problems.

...Some people call me ignorant for using Maxtor, but I honestly only order Maxtor for my hard drives. Now the only downside to the Maxtor 500 GB is that it is an external drive that, if not careful, can overheat and cause connectivity problems, transfer speed issues, or just annoyance from when the usb gets knocked out. That being said, if you can get past the downside of have an external I would recommend this product to anyone not using a Mac. The only reason I do not recommend this to Mac owners is because Mac is the only type of computer that I myself will not touch. I have filled this thing up to about half it potential and when I do manage to full it up, I will write agian to let you know the outcome.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: small, lots of storage and really reliable
Disadvantages: less portable than a small form hard disk drive, needs main to use

...This is my second hard drive. The first one I bought was a sony vaio that I bought off of ebay - a portable 120GB hard disk drive from the far east. It started giving me disk read and write errors about three to four months after I bought it. Moral of the story, buy from a reputable manufacturer and seller. So I bought this from Amazon co uk, who are by far a superior online seller. Prices have come down and i managed to get this for £60 including free delivery. The drive is compact, not portable. It needs to be plugged into mains as well as the computer which makes it less portable, but it is so quiet I can't even hear that is switched on even when it is writing or reading. I would highly recommend this product or even one of the bigger sized ones, though I couldn't afford the 1TB mybook. Remember 500GB is marketing... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Simple setup, Quiet, Small size, large capacity
Disadvantages: none

...SUMMARY The Western Digital (WD) My Book Premium 500GB is a small, well built external hard drive which is quiet in operation, with excellent capacity and choice of USB 2 or Firewire connectivity. As someone who is interested in technology, photography and video editing, I often end up running low on storage space on my PC. I had been looking to get another hard drive for some time and had seen the WD advertised in a magazine at a reasonable price. I bought mine from an online retailer and as of March 2006 have been using it for 3 months and I have not experienced any problems with it. FEATURES Well without wanting to make it sound as though it's not a good product, because I think it is, there's not much to it, it's just an external hard drive, however it is stylish and feels well built. It is quiet as there is noisy fan... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast, nice to look at, easy to use
Disadvantages: Ummmm, the pro version is only available in white?

...As information for those who don't know, this is an external storage device. Basically that means that inside the device is a hard disc drive for storing your data and it connects to your computer via either USB or firewire (all types). There is lots of information about the device that need explaining. Firstly it can store up to 500Gb's of information in what is known as raw format. When you format the device to make it compatible with your computer you will only be able to store 465Gb's. This is because the device needs a file allocation table which is a directory of all the information on the drive. It takes up lots of space but the device is useless without it. The speed of the actual hard drive used inside doesn't actually matter that much. The speeds at which hard drives can exchange data is far greater that the firewire 800... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Small, Compact, Quite, Ease of Installation
Disadvantages: None that i can think of

...This is one excellent product. i bought one with my other 3 hard drives being filled with files and music etc. i thought that buying an external would cut all of my problems with the fact that i went through a lot of DVD-r's with burning data for work and other things. By jove has it done the job, i now store all of my work files, music, videos and all sorts of other data. i carry it into work in the morning and plug it in, i then use it for the day and then unplug, carry it home again and plug it in. i have tried in either port USB or Firewire and they both work like a treat. it is quiet and doesnt heat up tooo much.i also like the way that the led on the front has 4 differnet modes and these are the following: Power on state or power save mode Transitioning to System Standy Standby Mode System Standby Drive In Use... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Simple Setup, great value for money
Disadvantages: Win 2000/XP/Vista only - not for Win 98/ME

...I have previously purchased a Freecom 500 GB external drive drive and have been very happy with it's performance and reliability. So when the drive started to become 80% full it was time to look for some additional storage. I saw the new Freecom 1TB drive on Amazon and given my previous good experiences purchased one straight away. It arrived this morning (Tuesday) having ordered in the previous Friday, and all of this post free. For anyone that hasn't bought a Freecom external hard drive before, you get a very stylish drive unit, power adapter, leads and installation disk. Installing (in my case) took less than 5 minutes, most of the time was spent unpacking the pieces. Simply attached the usb lead, power pack and switched on. Instantly recognised by the Windows XP operating system as the next drive letter. The unit is virtually... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful