Advantages: Fast and Silent, Easy SATA installation, Two flavours to choose from
Disadvantages: Dismal performance

...Maxtor are one of the 3 leading hard drive manufacturers in the personal and business computing market at the moment along with Western Digital and Hitachi. They are also the cheapest. Unfortunately, the saying that price doesn't equals quality is true here. Too true. The 160GB version of the DiamondMax Plus9 can be purchased online from around £51.00 onwards. And with the way hard drive prices have fallen recently, that's not bad at all. But as I said, you're getting cheap quality to match the cheap price. The drive itself looks very similar to any other hard drive, and comes in both IDE ATA/133 and SATA 150 flavours, with the SATA ones easier to configure due to their jumperless installations. My personal experience with this drive has been short. I first purchased this drive to use in my first ever custom-built computer... Read review

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Advantages: Plug and Play, Really Fast Doesn't Overheat
Disadvantages: Nothing =D

...the International Forum Design Award for 1007. Another thing that makes this hard drive so great, is that there is a low noise output because it is fanless and has Optimal Internal Airflow Managment. For 160 Gigabytes the storage space is big and really fast to access, with an average seek time of 9 miliseconds and a track to track seek time of 0.8 miliseconds. The average latency time is 4.2 miliseconds and the rotational speed is 7200 rpm. Data can be transferred as fast as 480 Mbits per second depending on your USB Interface. There is also backup and multimedia software provided with the hard drive but is only for use on the windows operating system 2000/XP. All the software is easy to install and use but personally I would not recommend you install it because you may not need it. But the choice is really up to you. I got this fantastic peice... Read review

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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

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Large and fast removable storage.
Disadvantages: Can get a bit warm during operation.

...I've owned this drive for a few months now. I bought it because I needed a large amount of storage space but didn't need access to the data all the time. **Size and Speed:** This "250 GB" drive gives 233 GB of space once formatted. This isn't the largest model on the market; there was a 300 GB model too, but that one only had 2 MB of cache and spins at 5400 rpm, compared to the 8 MB and 7200 rpm spin rate of this drive. This extra speed generally helps files to be accessed faster - I've played plenty of games from this hard disk and compared to my internal hard drive (7200 rpm, ATA100) it's not all that much slower at loading. **Connections:** The great thing about this drive is that it has both USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 backward compatible) and IEE1394 "Firewire" connection options. Since my computer is somewhat old and only had USB 1... Read review