
Fantastic Black Box - I have had this item for nearly a year and it has never let me down, it runs quiet and warm but not hot.The transfer rate is very good so why other people complain about this great Black Box is very strange.Please remember only turn off external hard drives with the Safely remove hardware icon on the PC, do not turn off with the hard drive switch if the PC is running.
Very good product - I ve had this drive for about 9 months: it is in use every day and is often moved between offices. It works perfectly, is quiet, and seems well made.
Very Serious IO Errors - I ve had this drive for about 4 months and I am just starting to get very serious IO errors. The drive is clicking away on certain sectors, which are now unrecoverable. the data is lost.These drives *might* be ok if you leave them in one place and don t ever touch them. But don t ever try to move them. They seem to be extremely fragile. Don t trust your data to them.
Does what it says in the spec - Very good VFM - Having had two Western Digital HD s previously (which are a tad temperamental), I opted to go for the Freecom HD, after reading the recommendations on Amazon. So where do we start? The first drive actually suffered a hardware failure - a clicking sound could be heard, and the drive did not show up on two different PC s. No matter - I rang the Freecom helpline who confirmed that the drive was indeed faulty. They offered a replacement, but I had to pay the postage - so I opted for the Amazon returns procedure instead - within 24 hrs, I had a replacement!Getting started is very easy - I am using Win XP, so it is just a case of plug and play - no drivers are required. Unlike the Western Digital (WD) drives, the Freecom one operates in virtual silence. It does get warm, but that is nowt to worry about. The actual size of the disk is around 465GB, so not actually the full 500GB. It is worth partitioning the drive using NTFS as you would not necessarily want to keep all your files on one partition in case of drive failure. Performance is quite good - about 5-7 mins to transfer 4.5GB worth of data. I can also access the drive via my PS3, so I can watch DivX files directly from the drive via the Media Server functionality - not need to unplug anything, cart it over and the re-plug everything back up again. I have not tried to plug the drive directly to the PS3, nor have I any intention to do so - the streaming works just fineOverall, a good product. I wasn t that bothered about the drive failing when I first got it - I am simply transferring files from DVD to the drive as a back-up only. Again as with all things, such devices can fail - so remember to back up your data where possible, otherwise you may lose it permanently.
Excellent Choice - I ve been buying and using hard disk drives for very many years and I ve had only good experience with Freecom. This is one is no exception.What I like in particular is that there s no fan so it s blissfully quiet and there s no annoying delay while I wait for the drive to spin up.I ve been using this model hard for months now and it s proved reliable, same as all my other Freecom drives.This particular version is in a plastic case. If you like things to have a good engineering feel about them then I suggest that you consider the alternative with a metal (silver-coloured) case ... but not if the price is very much higher: the plastic doesn t seem right but in fact it works.