Advantages: Fast, Quiet and Efficient
Disadvantages: None

...I bought this drive as a temporary solution whilst I saved for a 100GB Seagate Momentus. It cost me a tiny £37.59, but proved to punch well above it's wieght for the money. Firstly, lets look at the speed of this drive. It easily beats my desktop PCs backup slave drive, a 40GB Hitachi Deskstar. It also thrashed my 80GB Toshiba 2.5" hard disk in my other laptop (!) which cost me £75! So the drive is up to the performance of even larger dirves, but what about the noise levels? Thankfully, noise is non-existent with the Momentus. All that is audible is the occasional seek, but nothing much compared to the 80GB Toshiba 2.5" laptop hard disk. You can hear that on idle, and every tiny movement it makes is clearly audible. A real nightmare when you're trying to concentrate on a really important piece of coursework, or trying to enjoy some... Read review

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Advantages: Speedy, High Capacity, Quite, good customer support
Disadvantages: Requires a bit more power than other laptop drives.

...If you are looking for a good hard disk for your laptop you are looking at the right line of Hard disk from Seagate, the Seagate Momentus is one of the best laptop hard disks out there, I have been using one for some time now and have had it never go wrong, the only down side to the disk the power consumption of it is around 1 amp (5 watts) usually and for most low end disks it is usually around 0.5 amps (2.5 watts), but this is down to the speed of which the disk spins at, a staggering 7200 RPM, for a laptop hard disk this is fast, as most hard disk for laptops only work at ether 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM. Since this hard disk has such a fast spindle, it means that it can read and write like 'Billy Stink' (old expression!) The price for this disk isn't too bad considering that you are getting a high speed, high capacity disk that is nearly... Read review

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Advantages: Small, fast, large cache
Disadvantages: Expensive

...times. So overall it performs well. Seagate are a trusted manufacturer and have been around for a while. As far as I'm aware they have never made a bad device line, but then my HDD's of preference are normally Western digital. The device uses an 8mb cache, this isn't a special as it used to be since many other 2.5"HDDs now use this amount but its still a plus point for the device. It runs a 7200RPM, this is about the same as many normal 3.5" HDDs but is quite fast for a laptop variant. As I said before it is important to look at your need for this type of device, there are many other devices available that do the same job but for a far lower price. You should only buy 2.5" HDD's if you really need one and if you can't use anything else. I bought this one new from Ebuyer for just over £100 inc VAT and delivery. Its now happily running... Read review

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Advantages: Stable in use.
Disadvantages: AGPx2 only, 750 buggy chipset, No CS from Gigabyte.

...The 7ix has now been superceded by the 7ixe. My experience with the original 7ix has been a very unhappy one. To be fair to gigabyte, the problems i encountered are mainly down to the chipset it uses, the AMD 750. This chipset has a number of bugs/limitations as I discovered. Its limitations are a 2X only AGP speed (4X is the standard). If using a Geforce graphics card (as I do) then you will be limited to 1X only due to a bug in the 750. Another limitation is the lack of overclocking facilities (if you are into this kind of thing). The FSB is locked at 100mhz and cannot be changed. Support from Gigabyte is legendary.... for being none-existant. Gigabyte provide no aftersales support whatsoever for any of their products, another reason not to buy. So, any good points? Well maybe. The 7ix is very stable. Bios upgrades can be found... Read review

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Advantages: Affordable, easy to to use, no fuss, choices and support galore.
Disadvantages: Sign-up process a little confusing

...-- *** Economy Plan ($39.95/mo - £21.35) 10 GB Disk Space 400 GB Data Transfer *** Deluxe Plan ($49.95/mo - £26.65) 15 GB Disk Space 800 GB Data Transfer *** Premium Plan 50 GB Disk Space ($69.95/mo - £37.35) 1200 GB Data Transfer -- Dedicated Plans -- *** Economy Plan ($219/mo - £116.65) 1 GB RAM; 1 Drive 120 GB Storage 1000 GB Data Transfer *** Deluxe Plan ($229/mo - £122.25) 1 GB RAM; 2 Drives 240 GB Storage 2000 GB Data Transfer *** Premium Plan ($239/mo - £127.60) 2 GB RAM; 1 Drive 120 GB Storage 2000 GB Data Transfer *** Premium-Plus Plan ($249/mo - £132.95) 2 GB RAM; 2 Drives 240 GB Storage 2000 GB Data Transfer Unlike most other companies I investigated there are no set up fees! I have been very happy with the performance and the support system was very helpful and staff were very understanding even when it turned out to be my own... Read review

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Advantages: Very fast
Disadvantages: poor documentation

...If you are looking for a fast 30GB hard drive then this is one of the fastest there is. It has UDMA66 support, although now if you can afford it you might as well get one that can support UDMA100. This disk has a high transfer rate and low access time. For the cost this is an extremely good drive. My only gripe with it is there is nothing on the drive outer to show the jumper settings. A small leaflet is supplied with the drive, but if you mislay that it is guess work to decide what jumper to set to make the drive master or slave.... Read review

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Advantages: Great stability.
Disadvantages: PS/2 ports can cause problems.

...This was my first venture into self build PC's and I'm glad I chose this motherboard. The installation was simple helped by the generally helpful manual. I paired it with an AMD K6/2 450Mhz and 2X64mb PC100 sticks of ram. It was a smooth fast install with no problems whatsoever. The bios contains all of the usual features you would expect and is easily navigated and the settings clear. The boards layout is pretty good allowing you to access the dip switches and most jumpers without removing your IDE and Power cables. Aswell as the above components I use a 16mb ATI graphics card which has worked fine in the board. I do have one small thing i find annoying. I'm not sure whether Gigabyte use cheap ps/2 ports or not, but i have had my fair share of troubles with them. My latest keyboard reports an error after cold boot if the pc hasn't been... 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

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Advantages: Decent frame rates, unlockable pixel pipelines and vertex shader, Silent cooling
Disadvantages: Heat

...heatsinks connected by two heat pipes to distribute the heat. This is a very smart idea by Gigabyte due to it giving silent cooling for those who cant stand the noise of fans but also makes the card idle at a rather high temperature of 60C Extras: The Geforce 6800 can be overclocked to a fair amount but not as much as some would like, it can overclock by about 100mhz core and 200mhz memory on stock cooling. It all depends on the batch the card was made in and the quality of the cooling on the card to gain more overclockability. Another extra is that the Geforce 6800 has four unused pixel pipelines and an unused vertex shader which can be enabled to provide more of a boost to the graphics card. Combined with overclocking this can save a fair amount of money instead of buying a 6800 ultra and provide the same quality of gaming as the ultra... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Reliable, big capacity & amazing value for money!
Disadvantages: Doesn't look like it would take too many heavey knocks

...This is a pretty standard USB HD but with a whopping 500GB for under £100 it is amazing value for money. So far I've had no problems with it. I run mostly audio/graphics from it (which is very demanding). This HD has no problems dealing with the big files I Use, providing an excellent transfer rate. It is pretty quiet, the only noise it ever makes is a slight hum! I carry this every where I go with my laptop, it's taken a few knocks and survived OK, but I wouldn't want to test it too much, as the case doesn't look like it would protect the drive too well! The design is pretty funky and its size isn't too big either! I've had big portable drives before which were a pain to transport! this fits into my laptop bag perfectly! This drive is well worth the buy.... Read review

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