Advantages: Solid, feature packed, easy to use
Disadvantages: Not as fast as direct attached storage, plus a little noisy.

...I have been using my Buffalo (called 'Bertie'!) for over 4 months now, and it has worked very well indeed. Bertie is connected to my gigabit switch and is accessed by 4 other computers, and it also hosts a file sharing site too. The drive sits in a Windows environment, and is very easy to connect up. After a 15 second boot process, you access the features of the drive through a browser. All the usual tools for network drives are there, plus some seriously useful user permissions, and trashcan tools. It has hot swappable drives too (I bought a spare just in case), but this sold beast I feel will never breakdown. It's not the quietest drive in the world, but this is a minor annoyance. The actual data transfer over the network is not as fast as directly attached storage, but the benefits of using a network far out weigh this. When I need... Read review

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Advantages: Flexibility, Smartsync Software
Disadvantages: Simultaneous access to Mac and PC

...allows you to schedule folders locally to sychronize with folders on your network storage. Very handy and again very user friendly. Altogether a very cool piece of kit. I'm glad i got it.... Read review

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Advantages: 750GB, 7200rpm, Hi-Speed USB, Very reliable & Easy To Use
Disadvantages: None

...The Buffalo Drive Station Turbo USB HD-HS750U2 750 GB is a very useful external hard drive. I have networked computers so use it for back up and storage, which makes it easy for the networked computers to access the same data from one unit. The unit itself is well designed and looks good, its basically just going to sit next to your computer and is just a shell for the hard drive inside and for that it looks quite cool. The dimensions of the unit is 1.8" (w), 6.4" (d), 7.9" (h) and it weighs around 1.5kg. The external hard drive lets you back up and easily access various stored files and folders without taking up room on your PC's main hard drive. This is based on the SATA hard drive technology which is for larger capacity and with turbo USB technology, The hard drives transfer rate is much more than those of standard USB hard drives... Read review

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Advantages: All in one unit, compact
Disadvantages: Can get noisey when hot

...tempting feature. As it says, is to obviously host your own website, on the HDD. You will of course have to regester a domain name, but you can pick up tose cheaply now-a-days. Mail Server - easy to set up mail server means you can set up office e-mailing systems. Again a feature i don't use as I don't need it. VPN - Make a 'virtual' network over the internet Port fowarding - for when you have download clients like Azureus, which needs to have ports opened, you can set access to a specific PC in the network. Shared Folders - Set up certain folders on the HDD for everyone on the network to share files in, ie. music, movies, setup files Print Server - connect a USB printer to one of the four USB ports and you can share printers on the network. No need to transfer files inbetween PC's to print. You can even connect USB flash drives and card... Read review

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Advantages: Portable (almost). fast and reliable.
Disadvantages: Expensive drives and disks, will not be compatible with any other drive, requires extra power source

...I would assume, given the imcompatability issues and the cheapness of other, higher capacity, storage devices, that most people are put off buying into iomega's well known but almost archaic technology, the zip drive. When looking into storage devices a couple of years ago i was tempted but the £120 price tag for a 100mb parralel port device was too much money for not enough storage or speed so instead I opted for a cheap cd-rw drive which although incredibly slow at burning CD's has served me well. On moving to university I found that almost all of the networked PC's in the IT centres, at Sheffield Uni, had zip drives, and considering the incredible download speeds achievable on the university network, the though of a zip drive reentered my mind. Priced at around £60UK I was still a bit wary, but mangaed to get a Zip100 USb device... Read review

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Advantages: Well styled, solidly built
Disadvantages: Little over priced for spec

...here! Storage The laptop has no floppy drive, if you need a floppy drive then you’ll need an external floppy drive which plugs into a USB port. The laptop has a DVD and CD Writer combo drive, I’m not sure exactly what speed the drive is but it wrote a CD in just a few minutes. The laptop contains a 60gb hard drive which is more than enough storage for most people (I think the hard drive was an optional upgrade - I think it comes with a 40gb drive as standard). Battery Life Battery life is excellent, I’ve had around 4.5 hours of general usage from the laptop without needing to plug it in. I wasn’t using the DVD drive during this time, doing so would probably cut the battery life quite a bit. Screen My particular model has only a 14” screen which is very clear and sharp and capable of a resolution of 1024 x 768 (XGA). However, Dell do... Read review

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Advantages: Large capacity, quiet when not in use
Disadvantages: Can in noisy when in use

...I bought this about 6 months ago, as my internal 80gb hard drive was getting full and I needed something to back up my MP3 files and documents. I also planned on transferring the family camcorder videos to DVD, so I needed some extra storage. I’ve always wanted a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) but they seemed expensive. A NAS is a small box that connects to your computer via a network, using your router, and has a hard drive built in. After looking at a range of external storage devices, I decided on this external USB hard drive. There were several sizes but 320gb seemed right based on the price. Setting it up was very easy, just plugged in the power and connected it to the computer via the supplied USB cable. It was already pre-formatted with FAT32 but I prefer NTFS, as it includes compression, so it may increase the size... Read review

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Advantages: Price, Speed, Reliability
Disadvantages: Noise

...I have been using this drive for some months now having bought it to augment my then system. I have used Maxtor drives almost exclusively in the past and have found them to be both reliable and fast drives, I have not yet needed to return one, unlike with other brands. Maxtor offer a good range of drives now including SATA and PATA drives (such as this one) with 2mb and 8mb cache sizes. I opted for the lower as I had no need for the slight improvement in speed as this drive was only ever intended as a media storage drive. The pricing of these drives and indeed the entire Maxtor range is competitive. Though not the cheapest drives available I believe that the small difference increase in price over the cheap drives is worth it for the potential gains in reliability and speed. Maxtor only have Western Digital to match them... Read review

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Advantages: Quick to set up, Mac & PC compatible, good range
Disadvantages: Issues with the 802.11n draft compatibility with other brand PC Wireless cards.

...already have poor internet connection this isn't going to perform a miracle and give you a different connection speed. Good tip with wireless networks... to improve your network signal you can always help boost it by using mirrors to reflect the signal around your house more. So in summary... Compact, neat, smart design unit, great compatibility, easy to use, fast speed, easy to set up, very reliable, Apple support is good, Apple forum also very helpful, personally I think it's good value for money but I'm hardened to the price of Apple products unlike the average PC user. Bad points... These are the niggly points, works with most external storage hard drives but there are a few that just don't like the Base Station, so it's worth checking out forums before buying if you wish to connect up to a particular one. I found that one of my old... Read review

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Advantages: inexpensive, can use any IDE hard drives
Disadvantages: slow

...The Promise ConnectStor II, is a nice little RAID 0/1 Network Attached Storage device. The hardware RAID is what attracted me to this NAS in the first place, and the flexibility of using my own IDE hard drives has sold me. Opening the box and installing my 2x250GB WD hard drives was fairly easy. There's enough space in the box and the power and IDE cables are long enough to get everything hooked up. The only thing that was challenging, was the fact that the hard drives mount to a plate which in turn bolts to the case. So once the hard drives were installed, I had to hold the plate with both drives on it, hook up the cables and then position and attach the plate. Plugged everything in and powered up. The first problem encountered was the IP conflict. The Promise ConnectStor II uses 192.168.1.1 address as the default setting... Read review

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