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

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

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

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

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

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

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

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

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