Advantages: Supersized storage
Disadvantages: Weighs a tonne

...away or hide and fits in with most colour schemes. There are no external buttons or markings except on the face when the hard drive is plugged in 400GB lights up in blue to let you know it is working and transferring. We purchased the hard drive from PC World at approximately £102 but the price seems to be differing in all electronic stores - it appeared to be on offer in PC World so we didn't think that was a bad price to pay seen as we paid £80 for an 80GB Freecom Hard drive in October last year from Comet. Be warned I have just checked and Currys have priced this at £159.99 so shop around!! Noise level: There does not seem to be any noise emitted from the hard drive which is good as that on top of computer fans makes listening to the tv very hard indeed! All in all a great product, great design, a storage capacity that would take... Read review

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Advantages: good size, cheap, great customer service
Disadvantages: gets very hot

...I am a web developer and have several very large software packages installed on my laptop which take up a lot of memory when being used simultaneously. My machine was running very slowly. I bought a I portable external drive as it was small and light so I could carry it with me (very important as my laptop goes everywhere with me). I thought it would take ages to fill. I was wrong! I download lots of films and music etc which took up most of my memory but lets face it I don't need them with me 24/7. so I had a look on the web and found the freecom website. I saw this 400GB drive for £74 and thought it would be perfect. I would describe it as cheap and chearful. It's big, it's not that pretty and it's heavy. The fact that it has to be plugged in annoyed me at first as i was used to my portable one. However as it just sits on my desk... 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: Fast, high capacity storage. Well built, looks good. 2 year warranty, No fan.
Disadvantages: No fan.

...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 and certainly... Read review

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Advantages: No fan noise
Disadvantages: Annoying light when you turn PC off

...Originally i wanted to replace my old 250GB external hard drive with something of at least 500GB, and was looking to spend around £200. But then I saw an offer at PCWorld for this drive for £109. I went to the store and then used my student discount to get it for (what I thought was an amazing) £98.99. I felt the loss of 100GB was worth a 100 quid saving! But still, 400GB is a massive amount of storage. Most people will have no problem fitting all their music, videos etc etc on it. The biggest plus about this drive I think is that it doesn't have a fan. Pretty much all other drives do, and this can make them quite noisy. This one on the other hand runs almost silently, with just the faint spinning discs being apparant. Store it under your desk though, for example, and you can't even hear this. For anyone who has had external drives... Read review

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Advantages: Extremely durable, vast capacity, simple to use, reasonable price
Disadvantages: Not always plug & pay ; needs software installation on a few PC's

..., CD-ROM drive, Windows 2000/XP, MAC: Mac OS X v.10.1 or higher, available USB port (Bundled True Image software does not support MAC OS). Interface Transfer Rate ; 480 Mbps Seek Time ; 12 ms (average) Track-to-Track Seek Time ; 2 ms Average Latency ; 7.14 Spindle Speed ; 5400 rpm The above information about speed doesn’t really mean anything to me but in my experience I have found it to be quick both to read from and to write to with no noticeable lag. This retails from £50 - £100 so its definitely worth shopping around for *We also have a 400GB Freecom external hard drive which we use for our photo archive although its bigger and brushed aluminium rather than the funky silicon covering on its little brother... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap Large Portable Hard drive
Disadvantages: Heavy, useless software supplied, needed half a day to configure.

...I bought the Freecom 400Gb drive because I needed a lot of space to contain my backups and other files that I don't use that often that were clogging up the hard drives on the several computers that I own. I bought the device from Novatech in Hampshire UK, for £98.69, they can be found at www.novatech.co.uk, and their deals are great. The device came with a USB cable, power supply, pictorial installation guide and software and manual on a CD. When I got the drive home I plugged it into my server running Windows 2000 Advanced server, the drive was factory formatted with a single large Fat32 partition. When I tried to drag and drop a file onto the drive it reported that the drive was full and that I would have to delete some files from the drive, but it was empty. The computer reported the available space on the drive as 372Gb. So... Read review

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Advantages: ummmmm
Disadvantages: Doesn't work very well, slow, intermitently recognises disks, poor back up service, need I go on?

...I ordered my Freecom DVD Recorder LS USB 2.0 after my CD/DVD drive packed up on my 15 month old HP Desktop. I wanted it mainly to load CD ROM and burn DVD's from movies already converted to DVD format on my hard drive. Being that my PC had no disk drive I relied upon this external drive to load the bundled DVD burning software (Roxio 9). This took several days and many attempts. Then I tried burning my first DVD. After taking 3 hours to do a task that previously took about 30 minutes, this recorder produced a disc that no dvd player in my home recognised (and I have 4). I found the user interface very unfriendly and it simply didn't work. Needles to say, I'll be getting a refund!... Read review

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Advantages: seemed sturdy and well-liked
Disadvantages: actually stopped working within a month of purchase date

...I purchased this "Toughdrive" to store my ever-growing digital music collection. It would work sporadically, often turning itself off. I emailed Freecom, who informed me it was a power related issue (they send you a free power adapter if you live in the UK). One marketed feature of the Freecom Toughdrive is that it derives its power from the USB port, and hence doesn't require any extra plugs. As a consequence, they are not sold with the necessary component to operate properly with low-powered notebooks. By this point, my Mac iBook wouldn't even detect that it was plugged in to the USB port. I got my power adapter, (which I had to buy from another company because I live outside the UK), and it STILL doesn't work. I want to return it, but can't because it has all my files on. AVOID THIS PRODUCT AT ALL COSTS!... Read review

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Advantages: Easy to use, lots of features
Disadvantages: Noisy fan, problems with connecting to other routers

...I've wanted a Network Area Storage device for a while but the prices seemed a little steep. I wanted one that could be expanded with USB ports to add my external hard disk, and perhaps a print server. Even the simplest ones seemed expensive. Recently, just by chance, I found the Freecom FSG-3 Storage Gateway. It not only had a 400 GB capacity and have 4 USB2 ports, but it could also manage printers (a print server) - fantastic! There was a wireless version available too but since I already had wireless router I decided against it. I colleague at work mentioned he had the exact one I was looking to buy. After a long discussion I decided to buy one from Amazon. Three short days later, it arrived! I plugged it in and connected my two desktop PCs and everything worked fine, no problems. Then I tried plugging my ADLS wireless router into it... Read review

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