Advantages: Huge capacity, reasonably fast, 5 year warranty
Disadvantages: Not the fastest

...My laptop, a Dell 5150 is a fine machine (see review elsewhere on Ciao) but the 80Gb hard drive whilst big for a laptop is starting to get a bit cramped now I have both Windows XP and Vista on it so I've started looking around for a second hard drive so I can put Vista on one and leave XP on the other and then swap drives as needed. Luckily, following a previous hard drive failure, I have a spare caddy that the laptop needs so swapping drives would be a quick task, assuming I keep the tiny screwdriver needed handy in my rucksack! Laptop hard drives are smaller than normal - 2.5inch as opposed to 3.5 inch and tend to be at a price premium compared to the 'normal' sized drives, especially the bigger ones. They also tend to be much slower as they run at 4200RPM instead of 5600 or even 7200RPM that desktop ones run at. The reason being... Read review

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Advantages: Quite a fast drive.
Disadvantages: One of the "Deathstar" drives.

...Whether you are thinking of buying this drive (2nd hand, most likely as it's a couple of years old) or own one of IBM's 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models, read on for important information about issues with these drives and fixing them. ** THE DRIVE ** Capacity: 40 GB (38.3 GB as reported in windows) Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM Interface: ATA-100 Average seek time: 8.5 ms It's a fast enough drive. It seems to perform quite a bit better than the 5400 rpm 45 GB Western Digital drive I had, it's quite a bit quieter and this one's not dead ... yet. ** BORROWING NAMES FROM STAR WARS ** The main reason I thought I'd write a review on this drive, is to hopefully help a few others who have this or one of the other 60GXP, 75GXP or 120GXP models (as I've read these are equally affected). It didn't take long for a lot of people to start... Read review

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Advantages: Very fast, quiet and sleek design
Disadvantages: Could have a bigger capacity

...This external hard drive is perfect for anyone that owns a laptop, although it can also be connected to a PC. Looks The looks of this hard drive is minimalistic yet looks modern and sleek with an orange light on the front that glows when in operation. The size of the hard drive is very small, hence being perfect for laptop users as it can easily fit into a laptop bag. The hard drive also makes no sound what-so-ever. Using the Hard Drive It is a very easy component to use. All that you need to do is plug it in to your laptop of PC through the USB connector. The USB connector has a data+power cable and a secondary power cable for USB ports that cant supply enough power through the single port. This hard drive only has 120 gb worth of space but it is possible to get upto 160gb if 120gb is too small. Also if the 120gb hard... Read review

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Advantages: light, large storage and fast!
Disadvantages: -

...I had absolutely no need for one of these really but thought I would snap it up when a friend offered it to me for £40. As I travel between my mums and my own home a lot it was useful to be able to just unplug this and take everything I need with me and lug it straight into my mum’s pc. This particular portable hard drive is sleek stylish and has a decent memory capacity (80GB) it is USB-powered and needs no external power supply. ♡Specifications♡ Dimensions (WxDxH) 7.4 cm x 12.9 cm x 1.3 cm Weight 173 g Type Hard drive - external OS Required Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional , Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Apple MacOS X 10.1.5 or later Data Transfer Rate 480 Mbps Interface Type Hi-Speed USB Buffer Size 8 MB Capacity 80 GB... Read review

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Advantages: Quiet, fast, very portable, large amount of storage
Disadvantages: NONE

...I purchased one of these so that I had a large amount of backup space for various things that I have on my desktop PC and also to transport files etc between my PC and a friends PC. I paided £69 for a 60GB version of this drive, you can get cheaper drives but Western Digital are top quality ,the drive in my PC is a Western Digital and its always been very reliable, and like anything in life, you only get what you pay for, these very portable drives do work out a bit more expensive than the larger sized external hard drives. This external hard disc drive comes with a USB cable which is around 18 inches in length, this drive makes use of the high speed USB 2, but you can use it if you have USB 1, but the drive will be slower in operation. The drive feels very solidly built, and the base of the drive is incased in a thick rubber for shock... Read review

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Advantages: Speed, capacity, made by IBM!
Disadvantages: sometimes noisy

...IBM is a name that most people associate with Servers, or with desktop PC systems, but they are also one of the worlds biggest hard drive manufacurers. The Latest series of drives to roll off Big Blue's production line is the Deskstar 75GXP. Available in 15, 30, 45, 60, and 75 gigabytes capacity, these drives all share in common a 7200rpm spindle speed, 2mb cache, and UDMA100 transfer speeds. These features all make for a drive that rivals a much more expensive SCSI drive in performance, but for a fraciton of the cost. I have 2 of the 75GXP 30gb drives in my AMD Athlon system as we speak, and they're set up in a RAID array. The upshot of all the jargon is that the 2 drives act as one big drive, and effectively double the already impressive performance! Even using just a single drive, they are the perfect companion for the latest high... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Large Storage, Cheap, Clever, Reliable, Easy install
Disadvantages: n/a

...this drive compeet with faster drives (WD raptor 10krpm) but for around £50-60 knock 2 of them in Raid-0 and you will most likely have a very large, very fast drive setup for £40-50 less than a faster drive! I would suggest if you're in the market for a large, reliable, quitet drive you realy do need to look at Western Digital's 250GB SE16 Drive as this drive ranks at the top of the hard drive food chain, and is industry standard coming from WD who are renowned for their quality and the life span of their products. Western digital SE (special edition) is another way of stating that this drive has 16mb of cache instead of the usual 8mb (overall faster performance for sustained use, ie network storage) The drive spins at 7.200RPM (rotations per minute) which is usualy classed as the norm for higher end hard drives, where as a slower drive... Read review

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Advantages: Stylish and Compact
Disadvantages: Processing Power a bit lacking

...Memory 2 MB - L2 Cache RAM 1 GB (installed) / 2 GB (max) - DDR II SDRAM - 533 MHz - PC2-4200 Card Reader Yes Hard Drive 100 GB - 5400 rpm Optical Storage DVD±RW (+R double layer) - integrated Display 13.3" TFT active matrix WXGA (1280 x 800) Graphics Controller NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 TurboCache supporting 128MB Audio Output Sound card Telecom Fax / modem - 56 Kbps Networking Network adapter - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g Input Device Keyboard, touchpad Battery Lithium Ion Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional Manufacturer Warranty 1 year warranty... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Larrge Capacity, Price
Disadvantages: Compatibility

...Features Out of the box it looks pretty much like any other Serial ATA drives, although you can tell it is a Maxtor drive (and not just because of the huge label with Maxtor written on it either). Here are the drives full specifications from Maxtor: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard disk drive Capacity: 200GB Form factor: 3.5” Interface: Serial ATA 150 Rotational speed: 7200Rpm Buffer size: 8MB cache DPS (Data Protection System) SPS system to resist shock Operating mechanical shock 2ms (G): 60 Non-operating: 300 Quoted average seek time: <= 9.3 ms Quoted average latency: 4.2 ms B per sector/block: 512 Logical CHS: 16,383/16/63 Hot plug capable Weight: 0.63 kg The drive comes with a legacy power connector to cater for most of us who don’t have serial-ATA compliant PSUs yet. Serial ATA is also hot-pluggable, so if you... Read review

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Advantages: Very quick with firewire, quiet (no fan), sturdy and well-built, 4-6-pin firewire lead, looks cool!
Disadvantages: No backup/partitioning software included

...My laptop hard disk had recently been playing up, with sectors becomming corrupt all over the place. So I thought it was time to buy a decent external backup drive, with enough space for future storage needs. Luckily my laptop has a 4 pin Firewire connector so I knew backing up the 30GB of data wouldn't take too long, compared to using the USB 1.1 port. (take note: with some Firewire drives you may need to buy a 4-to-6 pin adaptor/lead for laptop use). After doing some research, and having previously used LaCie drives at an old design studio job and being impressed with them, I decided the D2 250GB was for me. It has 3 connectors: USB 2.0 (compatible with USB 1.1 but of course is slower), Firewire 400, and the new Firewire 800 (Apple only, but hopefully the PC will adopt the faster Firewire standard in time). I bought the largest HD I... Read review

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