Advantages: You can travel the world
Disadvantages: The cost

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Advantages: 250GB of internal memory!! At a reasonable price, too!
Disadvantages: No major disadvantages. Not as quiet as I believed it would be.

...I purchased this drive as an upgrade of my Acer Aspire laptop's 60GB 2.5" internal hard drive, and so far I have been delighted with it! The reason I chose this drive in particular, was due to the fact that it is an ATA drive (not SATA). ATA is the older drive technology, and as my Acer laptop is a few years old, it unfortunately does not support the more recent (and higher capacity) SATA internal drives. SATA drives are far more widespread now and are a bit easier and cheaper to find than the older ATA drives, but if you have an older laptop model, you will probably have to buy an ATA drive such as this one. After searching high and low, this 250GB drive from Western Digital was the highest capacity ATA internal drive I could find at a reasonable price, and so far it has not let me down! It took a bit of effort to clone my original... Read review

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Advantages: Price, Speed, Reliability
Disadvantages: Noise

...I have been using this drive for some months now having bought it to augment my then system. I have used Maxtor drives almost exclusively in the past and have found them to be both reliable and fast drives, I have not yet needed to return one, unlike with other brands. Maxtor offer a good range of drives now including SATA and PATA drives (such as this one) with 2mb and 8mb cache sizes. I opted for the lower as I had no need for the slight improvement in speed as this drive was only ever intended as a media storage drive. The pricing of these drives and indeed the entire Maxtor range is competitive. Though not the cheapest drives available I believe that the small difference increase in price over the cheap drives is worth it for the potential gains in reliability and speed. Maxtor only have Western Digital to match them... Read review

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Advantages: Very Fast, reliable,
Disadvantages: None

...One of the best Hard Drive makers in the business. I have never had any problems with this make of Hard Drive since I have been using them. Have fitted this make of Hard Drive in nearly every machine I have built for my self and for my customers for around the last six years and don’t think I have had one returned to me that is not working. Have tried all the other makes of Hard Drives and have had problems in one way or another with them except the Seagate drives.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Very Fast, reliable,
Disadvantages: None

...One of the best Hard Drive makers in the business. I have never had any problems with this make of Hard Drive since I have been using them. Have fitted this make of Hard Drive in nearly every machine I have built for my self and for my customers for around the last six years and don’t think I have had one returned to me that is not working. Have tried all the other makes of Hard Drives and have had problems in one way or another with them except the Seagate drives.... Read review

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Advantages: quality product
Disadvantages: poor product support

...i have 2 of these hdd in my box at the moment and am very happy with them lets go into a little more detail the drive is a 3 1/2" form factor drive which will fit into 99% of pcs the ease of instalation is realy dependant upon the case its going in but in a quality case you could install one of these in less that 2 minuits. the capacity of the drive is aproximatly 80 gb a real gig is 1024 , drive manufactures discovered that making a gig 1000 meg makes a drive bigger . then there is the shrinkage factor when partitioning and formatting etc. so on average the drive will be around 76 gig. the drives are not the quietest in the world but for the price are very good i would recomend these drive to anyone that is either building a new system or just needs more storage space... Read review

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Advantages: Quick burning and access time
Disadvantages: Poor build quality

...I purchased this drive early last year to replace a failing sony cd writer I had in my pc at the time. I had heard good things about this drive as it was supposed to be the fastest on the market at the time for burning both cds and dvds. After installing the drive in my pc the drive was picked up fine by the bios and windows detected it as the correct drive. The first thing I did was test the burn speed of both cd and dvd. I was not disappointed as this drive burnt cds in only a few mins and dvds were not much slower. Unfortunately as this was my only dvd writer I cannot compare it to other drives in the dvd writing department. In terms of cd burning, it was around 20 seconds quicker than my sony drive which was rated at the same burn speed (this may be due to newer firmware etc as the drive is about 2 years newer than the sony... Read review

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Advantages: Easy way to add storage
Disadvantages: More expensive than internal drives

...Having realised that on both of my internal drives had only a couple of gigs of storage free each, I realised that it was time to get an additional drive. My first thought of course was another internal drive, however unfortunately however I didn't actually have the space inside the case to fit a new hard disk. (Only 2 hard disk bays in my computer), and so turned to external drives. I eventually settled on a 250GB Freecom drive, which at the time seemed the best balance between cost and storage capacity, at just under £100 at the time of purchase, though I notice you can now get them for about £70. Appearance: The external drive consists of a silver coloured plastic box, slightly larger than a conventional internal hard drive. As well as the drive a USB cable and power cable where also provided. To set it up is incredibly simple... Read review

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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 2... Read review

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Advantages: Quiet, Swift, Great warranty and Online Support.
Disadvantages: Not much of a Manual but details can be found online!

...I have now been using this drive for over one month after waiting to gather all the components for my HTPC (Home Theatre PC). What do I think of this drive? I think that it is the best drive I have owned yet! Not only is the storage capacity great on this drive but it is lightning fast (compared to my old Diamond Max IDE Drive) and is also very quiet. The bios recognised the device instantly and with SATA cables being used instead of IDE, this gave my Silverstone case some extra space for air to help cool my system down. I have Windows Media Center 2005 loaded onto this drive and saw a few recommendations for this drive when using a HTPC. My system is linked to Sky Digital through a Hauppauge PVR card which is able to record straight onto hard disk without the need for a Sky+ Box. I fournd that the drive is able to record... Read review

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