Advantages: Portability, 500GB storage, Speed, Reliability, Warranty
Disadvantages: Slightly strange brown colour

...easy to have the drive run from a different PC if I wanted to. The offer with DABS was actually very good, in that the cost of the drive was going to be less than that for an internal 500GB SATAII drive, bargain ! I placed the order ( and I have to say, was very happy with the ordering / delivery process ) and I received the drive within 2 days. Once received, you can see that the product is very well packaged ( which is something I am very keen on, it shows that the product will be well protected during transport - not very good for us Eco-Friendly people, but the majority of packaging was cardboard containers, so its all recyclable - which is a plus ) Once you open up the box, (which also has a security seal on to show whether its been tampered with - which is also good ) you see the following FreeAgent desktop drive USB 2.0 cable... Read review

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Advantages: cheap - all that it is
Disadvantages: poor structure, prone to overheating, not reliable

...Out shopping for a new external hard drive the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop caught my eye. It looked appealing with a massive 500GBs and 5 year limited warrenty as standard. I thought it was great value for money. The dimensions are (WxDxH) 4 cm x 16.2 cm x 19 cm and it is 0.9kg in weight. This product is black in colour with a yellow strip of light which is constantly on, though it isn't too bright so i had no problems there. It's Interface Type is Hi-Speed USB and has a Data Transfer Rate of 480 Mbps. Also has a Spindle Speed of 7200 rpm. These are also compatible with the following - OS Required Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Apple MacOS X 10.3.9 or later, Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple MacOS X 10.4.6 or later This all sounded promising. After getting home i eagerly... Read review

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Advantages: ALOT of SPACE, very quick
Disadvantages: none

...with backups of university work, and photos (the 3 rules of computing are back up, back up, back up!). Performance It transfers at a very fast rate which in practise turned out to be surprisingly fast. Access time was very quick, so within the hour i had backed up and transferred my files!. I have had no trouble streaming games and movies from my hard disk, with access to files within the disk is as instant as a normal hard disk drive. It can be standing upright. 500 GB for this amount of money is a bargain.... Read review

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Advantages: small, lots of storage and really reliable
Disadvantages: less portable than a small form hard disk drive, needs main to use

...This is my second hard drive. The first one I bought was a sony vaio that I bought off of ebay - a portable 120GB hard disk drive from the far east. It started giving me disk read and write errors about three to four months after I bought it. Moral of the story, buy from a reputable manufacturer and seller. So I bought this from Amazon co uk, who are by far a superior online seller. Prices have come down and i managed to get this for £60 including free delivery. The drive is compact, not portable. It needs to be plugged into mains as well as the computer which makes it less portable, but it is so quiet I can't even hear that is switched on even when it is writing or reading. I would highly recommend this product or even one of the bigger sized ones, though I couldn't afford the 1TB mybook. Remember 500GB is marketing, actual... Read review

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Advantages: When working - Fast, convenient, massive capacity.
Disadvantages: Not reliable

...Started off very well. Plug and play as promised, via USB. Very easy to use, quick access : very simple to create folders and upload all those things you want to backup (you do keep backups, don't you?!). So on went all my MP3s, pictures, software, in case of a disk crash on my PC No problems for the first 8 months. Then it stopped working. Looked like it just wouldn't power up (green light only faintly flickered). Try to take back to shop under 1 year limited warranty, but would only offer replacement with NO data transfer. The word 'limited' is the key here. Overall very dissatisfied. A so-called high quality product which has proved to be very shoddy with no after-sales backup. Oh, and it came with a free Trojan virus. Having read many other reviews for the same product, the above I have described is not uncommon. I wouldn... Read review

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Advantages: Very good value, good transfer rate
Disadvantages: Fan noise may be annoying for some

...I recently bought one of these hardrives for around £60. So far, this hard drive has not given any problems what so ever. The physical size of the hard drive is not very big, so chances are you can find a place close to your PC tower to put it. The hard drive also dosnt weigh much so it is also fine to carry it around if you wish to connect it to a laptop. It's got a very smart look and feels quite sturdy, unlike some other hardrives that feel like cheap plastic. Data transfer rates is very good indeed. It is not the fastest since it uses a USB 2.0 connection to transfer files. Anything faster would be something with a firewire connection. Value for money is also very good, 500 GB of memory for £60 and free delivery to your doorstep is indeed quite the bargain at this point in time. We all know things get cheaper as technology... Read review

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Advantages: Holds tonnes of files!
Disadvantages: It is quite heavy.

...I decided to buy an external harddrive as I store a lot of music and photographs on my computer and I would like it to be backed up in case my computer breaks and my files are irretrievable. I decided to start on Amazon.co.uk and searched "external harddrive" on their main page. A number of different models came up - the Western Digital My Book external harddrive came up a few times with different storage sizes - 160GB, 320GB, 500GB etc. The Western Digital My Book external harddrive stood out next to the others as it looked to be a nice size, it was better looking than most of the others available with its smart black casing and it had more variety of what storage size you can get. Space The 320GB harddrive holds up to 90,000 photos or 80,000 songs or 25 hours of film. The 160GB harddrive holds up to 45,000 photos or 40,000 songs... Read review

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Advantages: Maximizes the amount of data vs the cost of the product
Disadvantages: heat issues, cord connectivity, and small installation problems.

...Some people call me ignorant for using Maxtor, but I honestly only order Maxtor for my hard drives. Now the only downside to the Maxtor 500 GB is that it is an external drive that, if not careful, can overheat and cause connectivity problems, transfer speed issues, or just annoyance from when the usb gets knocked out. That being said, if you can get past the downside of have an external I would recommend this product to anyone not using a Mac. The only reason I do not recommend this to Mac owners is because Mac is the only type of computer that I myself will not touch. I have filled this thing up to about half it potential and when I do manage to full it up, I will write agian to let you know the outcome.... Read review

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Advantages: Free
Disadvantages: Slow Uploads, Limited Download Capacity,

.... As for reliabilty and customer service I haven't been using mediamax long enough to personally be able to comment on these but if you were to do a google search for mediamax or streamload (part of mediamax) they certainly don't score highly for customer service or reliability also according to streamload they can only restore from their backups 10 terabytes (10,000GB) per day equivalent to 400 customers using the all of the 25GB of free storage per day something worth thinking about I think I might buy a external 500GB hard drive for £70 and wait until google launch their online storage service called gdrive... Read review

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Advantages: Very easy to use
Disadvantages: USB only

...The ‘Essential Edition’ of the Western Digital MyBook only has USB2.0, which for me, is fine as I can plug it into any computer I wish. Other editions include Firewire, which of course costs more and not all computers support Firewire. It has a (fairly long) 3m power cable, a standard USB (type B) cable to connect to the computer and the box itself, that is very simple to set up and to use. The front has a green circle that lights up when switched on and flickers when in use. Apart from that, it is completely black in colour and has no other distinguishing features. It took me 2 minutes to set up and start to use, and that included opening the cardboard packaging! I decided to buy the 500gb capacity, as I already had another external hard disk which has 320gb, which was completely full. I needed another 500gb as backup and storing... Read review

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