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

...(your drive may appear as a different letter). When it comes to finding the external hard drive you simply select you’re My Computer icon, and then click on the drive that your hard drive sits on. You can change the name of the hard drive to make it easier for you if you have difficulty to identify. The Freecom 500GB hard drive emanates little or no heat, and is incredibly quiet (my old external hard drive made lots of clunking noises). Providing you are connected by USB 2.0 everything moves at a reasonable pace not dissimilar to being an internal hard drive. My USB 2.0 ports are highlighted quite well, but I’m told with my PC’s the only way to check is to run a diagnostic check on your ports through your PC’s control panel. My Freecom hard drive cost me £50 from PC world, ironically hidden behind the 400GB hard drives “on special” at £49.... 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: 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: 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: memory, reliability, quality
Disadvantages: size, sound

...Technology is an ever growing and ever changing thing in todays supposedly modern and sophisticated world, which makes it ever so hard to decide what to spend your money on and whether the item purchased will be obsolete/cheaper the next month. As you may have cleverly deduced this particular external hard drive was one of those aforementioned products stated above. Around January 2008 i bought this little beauty for the reasonable sum of £90, although the price has roughly held its own, more products are being released such as 500gb external hard drives for £75 (ye gods). The price reductions can certianily not be a bad thing; it is more than a little discerning to feel as though you have been ripped off. The Product - The Seagate pushbutton backup external hard drive 400 GB is a very sturdy and functional machine which gives more... Read review

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Advantages: plug and play, fast and quiet
Disadvantages: External power supply

...the Freecom 160gb external hard drive is a so easy to set up, just plug into your usb drive and your ready to use. The main advantage of having an external hard drive is portability, you can store any files or programs and take them with you and plug into any computor with usb 2 ports. I originally bought mine to store my main hard drive disc image in case i needed to do a complete disc rescue, because it is external it will work even if your main hard drive decides to go belly up. it is fairly compact at 11.5cm wide 20cm deep and 4cm high It does sit nicely on my tower unit and because the colour is a nice matt silver with a black face it does blend in with the other peripherals I have. (all standard grey). You may think external usb hard drives run slower but this is fast with an average seek time of only 9ms and a track to track... 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: 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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