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

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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

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Advantages: Build quality, good brand, lots of connection choices
Disadvantages: Medium speed

...Storage is all important, whether you need it for your day-to-day work, or for backing up those important files, you can never have enough of it. A lot of users are now turning to off-site storage solutions, such as Amazons S3 service. However, if you need something fast and reliable, then there is no other option that a desktop hard drive. Iomega have been in this game for a long time. I remember with a warm glow, the day when the original Zip Drive was released. Wow, all that data on a tiny little disk, the size of a fat 3.5-inch floppy. Well, they kindly sent me there Professional Series Desktop Hard Drive, with triple interface to review. Offering up 500GB of storage, with USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and two FireWire 800 ports lined up across the back panel. It is also nice to see an on/off switch on the back too (many drives don't come... Read review

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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

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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

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

...USB 2.0 cable AC power adapter Quick start guide The drive comes in 3 capacities - but obviously, as per this review, I opted for the 500GB drive. One reason for choosing the Seagate drive, is that they are one of the best producers of HardDrives on the market, that along with their 5 year warranty on the drive is a definate plus for me. Getting it set up is very quick and easy, you dont need to be a techy to get this drive going. Under Windows XP ( which most people would be running these days ) its literally plug and play. Connect the power cable, and power on. Connect the USB2 cable, then connect the USB lead to your PC. This drive is USB2 ( also known as high speed USB ) however, if you dont have USB2 ports on your PC, then no problem, as the drive is backward compatible, in that you can connect it to your standard... Read review

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Advantages: Easy to install, easy to operate
Disadvantages: Power plug is a bit bulky if using extention lead.

...Having filled my PC memory with my databases, photo’s, hard copies of website content, and more recently using my PC as a media centre, the storage of 260GB which I once considered to be quite big disappeared. On a completely unrelated visit in search of ink I found myself in PC world, where they had the Freecom 400GB hard drives on special, but ironically enough the Freecom 500GB hard drives which were not on special were actually only £1 more expensive. Realising I had seen a good deal I picked it up. Upon opening the box you are confronted with a fair bit of padding, and a small box that transpired to be the hard drive, power cable (if plugging into an extention lead this bulky plug can partially cover the holes of adjoing sockets), a small piece of paper that constituted the instructions and a USB cable. It was not rocket science... Read review

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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

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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

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Advantages: Portable, easy to use, never failed on me yet!
Disadvantages: Perhaps only the disc size, but it has taken me 2 years to fill it!

...Wester Digital, a respected brand name, and i agree! I have owned the unit now for around 2 years, and have 0 problems. My internal hard drive has died on me twice but my external one, never! This 80gb HDD is perfect for storing large files, home movies, photo albums, music etc. It's ideal when transfering data from one place to another, simply unplug it, plug it in elsehwre and hey presto! It supports drag & drop so moving files couldn't be easier. Standard power adpater with 3-pin plug, and USB 2.0 connection to your pc, mac, server etc. It is easily recognised by each operating system and i have yet to find one that doesn't support the unit. Plug it in, wait around 30secs and it's up and running. Can be stored horizontally, and if you have 3 like me, you can stack them perfectly, or store them vertically... Read review

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