Advantages: cheap, easy to install, quiet
Disadvantages: no bundled software

...I bought the ST340810A – Seagates ATA-100 40Gb IDE 5400rpm hard drive when I was wanting to upgrade from a 20Gb Maxtor harddrive, and wanted a cheap and affordable hard drive. I paid ATS 1645 (around £75) for the drive, after having found this to be the lowest price for the drive on the consumer site geizhals.at (I get a lot of my hardware and software from places found here) from Goldadler – one of Austria’s cheapest computer retailers. Obviously this isn’t going to be the fastest kid on the block, being only a 5400 rpm drive (there are of course a lot of drives at 7200RPM) although funnily enough, this drive had a better average seek time that the 7200RPM model Seagate were offering with the same capacity (8.9ms average compared with 9ms average). It uses the Ultra ATA/100 interface, although there are patches available if your... Read review

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Advantages: Makes your pc cooler
Disadvantages: Not much

...This cable is a good buy. There varied in colour also in price, depending where you buy them from. But really, when there inside your pc, is colour really that important? First of all, I owned earlier versions of this type of IDE cable from different manufacturers, at a higher price to. All but 1 no longer work, I came to the conclusion, the reason behind this was. When you plug the leads in & out, there was no support for the pulling or pushing. Once or twice this is not really an issue, but over time if you constantly change things in your pc, problems will happen. My issue was that, some of the cable had ether been stretched to much whilst unplugging or bent & snapped inside the rubber casing as I plug them in. This resulted in your hard drive or other devices failing to be detected or causing system reboots. After purchasing... 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: Tough, fast and inexpensive!
Disadvantages: None to date.

...as opposed to the transfer speeds he gets with his Maxtor 200gb drive. SOME USEFUL SPECS Dimensions (WxDxH) 7.4 cm x 12.6 cm x 1.2 cm Weight 165 g Interface Type Hi-Speed USB Data Transfer Rate 480 Mbps Spindle Speed 5400 rpm Buffer Size 8 MB OS Required Apple MacOS X 10.1.5 or later, Microsoft Windows Vista / 2000 / XP Cables Included 1 x USB power splitter cable So would I recommend this hard drive? Well yes of course I would whats not to like? It has very good looks, its easy to install, it performs well, it has a very fast transfer rate, it's strong and durable and it is not too expensive. If you are looking for either a portable or just an external hard drive then take a look at this one! I have never had to contact the manufacturer so it is difficult to give you any idea of whether or not the support... Read review

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Advantages: Faster, larger, with good warranty, shop around for best prices
Disadvantages: I couldn't find any

...When it comes to hard disk drives, size is important but there are other features that you have to take into account. When I re-built my PC, I used my old 20.4Gb Fujitsu in my new machine until I could afford to buy a bigger and faster model. Then it was a matter of trawling through the hardware shopping sites, looking for the best value to size etc., and I came to the conclusion that I was looking at a choice between a Quantum and a Maxtor drive. Now that the two companies have merged (hence me writing an op about a Quantum drive in the Maxtor section) they have become the largest manufacturer of hard disks. While looking at the specs for drives, which I originally thought were similarly specced, I learned a bit about hard disk technology, well the IDE side anyway. There are quite a few standards available for the IDE interface... Read review

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Advantages: Fast and Silent, Easy SATA installation, Two flavours to choose from
Disadvantages: Dismal performance

...Maxtor are one of the 3 leading hard drive manufacturers in the personal and business computing market at the moment along with Western Digital and Hitachi. They are also the cheapest. Unfortunately, the saying that price doesn't equals quality is true here. Too true. The 160GB version of the DiamondMax Plus9 can be purchased online from around £51.00 onwards. And with the way hard drive prices have fallen recently, that's not bad at all. But as I said, you're getting cheap quality to match the cheap price. The drive itself looks very similar to any other hard drive, and comes in both IDE ATA/133 and SATA 150 flavours, with the SATA ones easier to configure due to their jumperless installations. My personal experience with this drive has been short. I first purchased this drive to use in my first ever custom-built computer... Read review

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

...I've owned this drive for a few months now. I bought it because I needed a large amount of storage space but didn't need access to the data all the time. **Size and Speed:** This "250 GB" drive gives 233 GB of space once formatted. This isn't the largest model on the market; there was a 300 GB model too, but that one only had 2 MB of cache and spins at 5400 rpm, compared to the 8 MB and 7200 rpm spin rate of this drive. This extra speed generally helps files to be accessed faster - I've played plenty of games from this hard disk and compared to my internal hard drive (7200 rpm, ATA100) it's not all that much slower at loading. **Connections:** The great thing about this drive is that it has both USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 backward compatible) and IEE1394 "Firewire" connection options. Since my computer is somewhat old and only had USB 1... Read review

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Advantages: Extremely durable, vast capacity, simple to use, reasonable price
Disadvantages: Not always plug & pay ; needs software installation on a few PC's

...or higher, 64MB RAM, CD-ROM drive, Windows 2000/XP, MAC: Mac OS X v.10.1 or higher, available USB port (Bundled True Image software does not support MAC OS). Interface Transfer Rate ; 480 Mbps Seek Time ; 12 ms (average) Track-to-Track Seek Time ; 2 ms Average Latency ; 7.14 Spindle Speed ; 5400 rpm The above information about speed doesn’t really mean anything to me but in my experience I have found it to be quick both to read from and to write to with no noticeable lag. This retails from £50 - £100 so its definitely worth shopping around for *We also have a 400GB Freecom external hard drive which we use for our photo archive although its bigger and brushed aluminium rather than the funky silicon covering on its little brother... Read review

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Advantages: Brilliant way of using spare hard drives
Disadvantages: a tight fit, with little ventilation

...storage facility for the PC for minimal cost. The problem was that many such enclosures exist for IDE drives, but fewer for SATA. Imagine my delight when I came on this one by NEWlink which can be adapted to either type. And so, ladies and gents, I offer you a review which may just inspire some of you to realise how utterly easy it is to make use of your full potential when it comes to old disks.! WHERE ? """""""""""""" I spotted this particluar model in Maplin, Belfast. Well to be exact, I spotted it in the catalogue in Maplin in Belfast. I had spent quite a few minutes looking through all the enclosures that were on the shelves and none of them was for a SATA hard disk. I proceeded to check the catalogue and discovered one dedicated SATA enclosure is stocked by Maplin and also this dual purpose one. I duly filled out one... Read review

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Advantages: Looks really nice, cools the hard drive by few degrees, easy to use
Disadvantages: None really

...Processor/CPU - The brain of the computer - a microprocessor chip which determines the overall speed of the computer, where most of the data-processing is done. Overclocking - When someone adjusts a component so that it performs faster then it usually would, by adjusting the factory setting. This can be very dangerous as it invalids warranty and can cause over-heating. Graphics card/VGA - Video Graphics Adapter - A card that plugs into the AGP or PCI slot on a motherboard, which processes the graphics for a computer, and sends it to the PCs monitor. Hard drive - A non removable disk which stores all the computers data, even when power is turned off. RPM - Revolutions per minute, often used to describe how fast the spindles inside a hard drive turn. RPM values range from about 5,400RPM to 12,000RPM and above. Motherboard - The main... Read review

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