Advantages: Portable, easy to use, never failed on me yet!
Disadvantages: Perhaps only the disc size, but it has taken me 2 years to fill it!

...Wester Digital, a respected brand name, and i agree! I have owned the unit now for around 2 years, and have 0 problems. My internal hard drive has died on me twice but my external one, never! This 80gb HDD is perfect for storing large files, home movies, photo albums, music etc. It's ideal when transfering data from one place to another, simply unplug it, plug it in elsehwre and hey presto! It supports drag & drop so moving files couldn't be easier. Standard power adpater with 3-pin plug, and USB 2.0 connection to your pc, mac, server etc. It is easily recognised by each operating system and i have yet to find one that doesn't support the unit. Plug it in, wait around 30secs and it's up and running. Can be stored horizontally, and if you have 3 like me, you can stack them perfectly, or store them vertically... Read review

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Advantages: Fast USB 2.0 connection, accessories, Compact, Looks COOL
Disadvantages: Requires a driver for Win98, Need updated USB 2.0 driver to use advanced features or your computer crashes, not all computers have USB

...You're copying a bunch of documents from your computer onto a 3.5" floppy disk. All is well, you see the sheets of paper flying across and the progress bar moving along nicely but then suddenly *BEEP*. A small window pops up saying your disk is full! A standard floppy diskette these days can only store 1.44MegaBytes (or 1,044KiloBytes) of data. Sometimes, it's not even enough for a single document these days, especially if there are pictures inside. Now imagine a disk that gives you 128MB of data. That's the same as 88.89 floppy diskettes! Yes, you've guess it (if you bothered guessing that is). The product I'm reviewing is a flash disk. Also known as pen drives, USB drives, flash drives, memory sticks, travelling disks, jump drives, etc. These are basically disks that plug into your computer via USB and act like a drive. Kind... Read review

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Advantages: Fast USB 2.0 connection, accessories, Compact, Looks COOL
Disadvantages: Requires a driver for Win98, Need updated USB 2.0 driver to use advanced features or your computer crashes, not all computers have USB, gets hot.

...This is a review on the PQI's USB 2.0 1GB 'Cool Drive' Travelling Disk. This product is very similar to my PQI 128MB Cool Drive Traveling Disk, which I've also reviewed, but with one BIG difference. The 1GB version of this drive holds A LOT more information than the 128MB could ever. Now what does 1GB mean? It's short for 1 GigaByte, which is 1,000 MegaBytes. Actually, the space shows up as 999MB but that's close enough. Now, if you've read my 128MB Cool Drive review, or at least seen the title, you'll know that 128MB stores roughly the equivalent of 88 floppy disks. Now the 1GB Cool Drive stores the equivalent of 694 floppy disks! Impressive, in'it? Now, the 1GB Cool Drive is practically identical to the 128MB Cool Drive. The drive is roughly the size of my thumb, it's metallic blue in colour with clear bits at the bottom and tip... Read review

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Advantages: storage - 4GB -
Disadvantages: awkward shape when in pocket

...**SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB Flash Drive -- 4GB** -- USB Flash Drive 4GB -- U3 Technology enabled (software installer supplied) Follow on-screen instructions for installation *Summary* SanDisk, is known for having the world's highest volumn as in (sales) for data storage. -- No other data storage business has the retail portfolio that SanDisk has. They are based in California and boasts to be the first company to announce the introduction of the USB Flash Drive. They provide storage and multimedia solutions for the home and small business environments. ScanDisk in 2005, went public in the US. In 2006, their revenue was 3.3 Billion US Dollars. Their site is: www.sandisk.com Two years ago the company founded by Dr. Eli Harari in 1988; hit on the world's smallest memory card; The memory Keys were to be exported to over 200... Read review

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Advantages: Fast transfer speed, protection from knocks and drops
Disadvantages: Fairly high price

.... Now, leaving the memory capacity of the hard-drive and moving onto other areas of the LaCie hard-drive. This particular hard-drive has a USB 2.0 interface, which is basically the type of connection the hard-drive uses in order to connect to an external device, usually a desktop PC or laptop. A USB 2.0 interface means that the transfer of all files to and from the hard-drive will be fairly quick. Another factor, which speeds up the transfer of files is the buffer size. Buffer size put into simple terms is a region in the hard-drive where data is held temporarily, before permanently entering the hard-disk memory. The buffer size of the LaCie external hard-drive is 8 MB, this means that a maximum of 8 MB of data is temporarily held before being fully transferred into the hard-drive. The buffering process means that data is transferred... Read review

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Advantages: no cap, large sorage space, U3 software is useful
Disadvantages: U3 auto-installing may annoy some people

...Firstly this USB drive is quite small, it looks good and as soon as you plug it in a big orange light starts up, it doesn’t have a cap (so you won't lose the cap!) and comes with a neck strap. The USB data transfer is quite fast, there is not much lag and the computer immediately picks up that the USB stick is plugged in. However as soon as you plug in the stick then it starts to install the U3 software on the PC, this could annoy some people but the software is very useful. You can download many free portable ap’s and can synchronise the USB with the PC using this, its a useful feature and also includes some security features, preventing nosey people looking through your files. The U3 software also has an instruction manual/tour on it, preventing the need for there to be any paper manuals with the device. The 2GB... Read review

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

....1 (which is pretty slow for hard drive usage - less than 1 MB/s), the firewire card I had in there for using with my camcorder was also used to connect this. Now I looked around a fair bit on the internet about how different the performance was between using USB 2.0 and firewire and there doesn't really seem to be a solid conclusion: Both methods are pretty fast (at about 15 MB/s in my experience) and certainly more computers tend to have USB than firewire, but firewire is supposed to have less of a drain on the cpu when transferring data, so this would be good if you are doing cpu-intensive tasks such as encoding video to the external disk (as I do with my camcorder). I've found both types of connection to work well and not had any problems (a cable for each type was supplied, but note that laptops almost always have a smaller firewire... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, high capacity storage. Well built, looks good. 2 year warranty, No fan.
Disadvantages: No fan.

...I've just rebuilt a couple of PCs and realised my external USB hard drive was no longer big enough to use to back them both up. Accordingly, I started looking around for a bigger drive. I was going to buy a bare drive and stick it in a spare external case but as I wandered in to PC World, I saw this little beauty on sale with a nice reduction in price to a mere £85 or so. I've previously seen 'bargains' in PC World only to find everyone else had also dropped their prices and PC World were still expensive so I checked online and found that this time <shock/horror!> they were actually genuinely cheap. Back to PC World it was then... Only to find the formally huge pile of drives had shrunk whilst I'd popped home so I grabbed one quickly, paid (as you do) and took it home. I have to admit up front I've never touched anything from... Read review

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Advantages: Small, easy to use, re-writable, reliable, extra caps, neck strap
Disadvantages: Might be too small, needs an extention cord for a desktop computer, still relatively expensive

...Have you ever needed to copy information from one computer to another when you didn't have a CD burner and the documents were too large for a floppy disk? One solution is to buy a CD or DVD burner drive. But those burners sometimes make errors, which you'll often discover only when its too late. Moreover, unless you're burning on a re-writeable disk, if you make a mistake you've wasted both the CD and the time it took to burn it. Plus, those CDs aren't quite as durable as we were led to believe. A scratch in the wrong place and your files will be unreadable. Finally, you don't always need 700mb (or more) of storage every time you want to take a bunch of files from one computer to another – so again, burning a couple of files onto a CD seems wasteful. But now there's a new solution - USB storage. My boss bought two different kinds... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, super-stylish and near-silent.
Disadvantages: Difficult to detect activity.

...I have owned this drive for a few months and have found it to be excellent. But I disagree with a previous review in several areas. This is the most stylish external hard drive I have seen. It is also one of the cheapest per GB, currently available for just £93 at Misco.co.uk, for example. It works with Macs and PCs and is almost silent. It comes with a USB cable and a driver CD for old Windows operating systems. The external design is superb minimalism and looks like it could have been designed by Apple themselves. The case is all aluminium except the front and back. The front face is black except for the capacity indicator of ‘500GB’ which lights up in blue and flickers during activity. The rear has the power and USB ports and a small power switch. The 500GB box value translates to 465GB under Windows due to the differing ways... Read review

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