Advantages: Fast
Disadvantages: Cost

...the leading edge LTO tapes have a small spring loaded "door" at the side through which the tape is dispensed into the drive. So unlike your videos, which spool from one side to the other, this is spun out in one long line and then rewound. I could be totally wrong but Fuji and the other manufacturers are a little obscure on this! Enough of that anyway; what do you do with them? You copy your ever so precious data onto it. Now I'm willing to bet a penny to an LTO drive that your data isn't worth £3000+. Nope, didn't think so. But for business it is. Frequently it's worth a lot more than that. Your average home user will NEVER need this much storage capacity. Each tape has a native (I.E. Uncompressed) capacity of 200GB. Most home PCs don't even have hard drives that big. Compress the data and you can get a theoretical capacity of 400GB... 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... Read review

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Advantages: Sound quality, FM radio and transmitter
Disadvantages: Photo ability, small memory

...your favourite TV series. There is a 2Gb model for not much more which may be better if video is your thing although space will still be tight. The Netac A200's real trump comes in the form of its FM transmitter. By default our unit came tuned to the same frequency as Radio 1 resulting in a patchy and somewhat distorted performance until I realised what was going on. After retuning it was considerably better. I tried it on a long car journey and after several hours use I found it to be perfectly usable once I'd found a frequency that was sufficiently far away from any existing stations out there. Conclusion Whilst the Netac A200 has a lot of functionality under its belt, I feel it's best to consider it a workmanlike MP3 player/FM Radio with FM transmitter capabilities that has a few bonus functions rather than a fully fledged media... 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... Read review

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Advantages: very fast, stable, read and wirte speeds
Disadvantages: not very many, low end of the market

...hard drive. I wanted a second one to do image editing on and some audio editing. I usually work with large video files, like movies for my studio, and also so that I could record TV with my TV card. This was by far the cheapest hard drive to buy, for the space reasons, and also by the fact that it was the fastest for the amount of money that I paid for it. Many people ask me what the hell I want with 200GB, but I tell them, I’m claustrophobic; I don’t like small/crowded space. ▼Little more information on Memory and space▼ Back in the 1960s and 70s, a megabyte of space on any component of computer was unheard of. Most computers only had a couple hundred bytes of space at most. But now in the 21st century, a single document takes up more space than that. This is why they have prefixes to all the space on our computer hard... Read review

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Advantages: Very capacious, Good qaulity, Good value for money
Disadvantages: Not supported properly by most operating systems

...I wanted to buy a Hard Drive that I could trust all my files with. I have had an External Maxtor Hard Drive for a while and I can admit it's taken some abuse, but it still works fine! So I decided to go for Maxtor's 200Gb drive, the DiamondMax Plus 9. I baught the OEM version, it was extremely good value for money, I got it for around £90! But the OEM version comes with no software and little did I realise that such a big drive needed to be specially activated first. I must have spent half an hour tinkering with it un til I took a trip to Maxtor's website and found some software that would set it up for me. And the software worked a treat, except for 1 snag. My ATA drivers couldn't support 200GB and the drive had to be formated to 130GB instead, thats 70GB of valuable space down the pan!! And I am using Windows XP Pro which is one... Read review

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Advantages: Big, fast, fairly quiet. + CHEAP
Disadvantages: IDE?

...OK...This is a very large and cheap hard drive. What can I say but IBM have done a superb job with this set of hard drives. The Deskstar 75GXP series all run at 7200rpm via IDE connection, and I think capacities from 20Gb to 65Gb. This 30Gb drive I'm reviewing here is an excellent upgrade. I upgraded from a 6Gb hard drive which had UDMA33 Connection, and a 5200rpm. Performance differences between my old drive and this IBM one is not dramatic but noticeable. For one thing it can make applications run a lot faster, and due to its higher rpm, it can process and save files slightly quicker. What I am amazed about is the quietness of it, there is a noise as you turn it on, but after it has initiated it you cannot hear it spinning, unless your computer has no fans...even the power supply fan which is really quiet drowns out the sound... Read review

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Advantages: Fast; High performance
Disadvantages: Known reliability issues

...IBM's Deskstar range of hard disks is well known in the IT industry as one of the best, but not always the cheapest - you pay a premium price for a premium product. I bought the 75 GXP as a replacement for a failed Seagate 40 GB drive. If you need a fast drive, but don't want to fork out for SCSI, this IDE drive should have what you need - it spins at 7,200 rpm, in comparison with many cheaper drives which can only manage 5,400 rpm. This makes a big difference if you use your computer for games or video editing. I bought the OEM version of the drive, so I can't include any details on the quality of the manual or any accessories included in the retail version. Of course, if you don't need the cables and other superfluous junk that comes packaged in the retail version, you can save yourself around £10 to £20 by buying the OEM version... Read review

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Advantages: Very versatile mid range server
Disadvantages: support web site can be awkward to navigate

...and and 4 143GB 15K disks for the data configured as RAID5 (with the addition of an IBM 7k RAID card) with a hot spare. This gives a 73GB OS partition which should be ample for most SBS installations including the exchange store. I tend to find that most SBS base builds come to about 20GB once everything is installed. This leaves just over 50GB for the exchange store and page file. The data partition would then be about 250GB which should be ample for most SMB's. Inside the server is just as good and as this model has the dual power supplies installed I would imagine it also comes with 6 cooling fans. If you see a cheaper price for the same model make sure it has dual supplies. There is a thick perspex cover directing air from 2 of the fans over the CPU and memory slots whilst two fans at the bottom suck air through the hard drive bays... Read review

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Advantages: IBM reputation, support, quality, Duron CPU, 200Mhz motherboard, 4X AGP slot, software package
Disadvantages: No matter how much you dislike to be seen in Comet, I think they are the only ones selling it. No paper manuals

...usually only runs on a 66Mhz board and is more or less the same thing as an AMD Thunderbird but with less cache. It comes with Via KT-133 chipset motherboard (same as used on Athlon Thunderbird systems!) that has a 200 Mhz front side bus, UDMA66 controller, 64Mb of PC 133 RAM, 10 Gb hard disk (5600 rpm), and unusually for a 'budget' machine it has a SEPARATE 4X AGP slot which houses a Diamond Stealth S3 Savage4 8Mb card, (none of this onboard video business which shares it's video memory with the main memory, - this slows a system up). Other components are a 56k modem, 48x CD, 3 RAM slots, 3 PCI and 4 USB ports. Then it's the usual VGA, printer, games, speaker, mic ports. The speakers look and sound reasonable too, though lack a bit of bass. The keyboard is internet enabled and has programmable buttons for one touch access to your... Read review

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