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Intenso Memory Station 320 GB
by Novabug
With the endless amount of music, pictures and video files we all seem to acquire nowadays, the thought of running out of computer memory space is an all to common problem. Also, computers have a habit of going wrong more frequently nowadays, at least for me, thus you could end up losing precious pictures or valued home videos. Backing ... up the files is a wise thing to do, and I do this several times over just to be sure. I recently required additional space for my music files and backing up my family pictures, and so went for the portable option of this Intenso USB 320GB external hard drive. Here are my thoughts about this smart little memory board.
~~Please note: This review is of the newer design shape, and differs from the image in Dooyoo's database. Internally however is it identical.~~
--Intensive Storage!--
Recently I had been trawling the on-line sites for an external hard drive for a while, but I was not really impressed by the look, value or description of the Seagate or Buffalo models. I was looking for something not massive in capacity, but more than 250GB, so the 1TB units costing close to £100 did not tempt me. Forgetting about buying one altogether, I wandered into a store of Maplin's and noticed an offer on their external drives. I honestly had not heard of the brand Intenso before, but after a quick check on my phone, their products seemed to have a good reputation. So the impulse-buyer in me took over, and that was that.
Intenso are a German based technology company with a whole range of computer peripherals such as UBS flash drives and SSD memory cards, but they also manufacture stand alone units like tablet PC's and MP3 players. Their range of products is very neat and tidy to look at, and similar to Toshiba in appearances. However, it's not a surprise they are not that well known, their website is unbelievably basic.
--Price and Packaging--
Like a lot of computer support devices, this item come to you in a sealed transparent plastic box, where the product is tightly fitted inside with very little in the way of inner protection should the package fall. Just a simple card insert, USB cable and a brief instruction leaflet is included. This is odd considering the delicate nature of disc drives, so I would have expected a little more in the way of protection. However, the plastic is fully recyclable so no waste I suppose.
Prices for this model, the 6003610, can be up to £60 in places, both on-line and in the high street. This is the successor to the 6002510 model, which can be found a few quid cheaper. As mentioned, I bought this on a sales offer, so it was a snip at £39.99. Considering the quality and capacity of the unit, I feel this is very reasonable. Currently its available on Amazon for just over £50.
--Design and Durability--
I'm the kind of person that likes a bit of original slickness and fun to the designs of computer kit, even though I can't stand Apple's design cues. The older model of this hard drive was rather more of a flat box, with a shiny finish to the covering. This is the updated model (6003610), and has a more rounded and smooth look and feel. It has a silk finish, which is much smarter I think, more like Toshiba and Samsung products. It's also an ultra-simple design, with the USB socket on the front edge and an activity LED on the top. This light I particularly like, as it's a cool neon blue coloured ring which matches my desktops and mouses coloured neon's. My desk now looks like a bad psychedelia trip on occasions. The light glows dim when the unit is connected, and blinks brightly when the drive is active. With the nice silver line around the border and simple non-intrusive logo of the top, It's a very smart and functional design.
One thing that strikes you about this instantly is that it's very light. Maybe feeling a bit to light actually, the kind of sense that it would shatter into pieces the first time it's accidentally dropped. I have no intention of finding this out however, so my advice would be, don't drop it! Given it's nature as a storage disc, I wouldn't expect it to be as hard as nails, but it does lack a little bit of hardiness to it. The outer covering of mine has already got a deep but small scratch, and I store it in a separate compartment of my laptop bag. No idea how this scratch happened. Unlike a flash drive which can be relativity thrown around the place, this is something to take a little bit of care of, and buy a carry case for it too. Plenty of universal cases fit it without issues.
--Performance--
A lot of us get a little apprehensive when connecting a major device to a computer, hoping that it works correctly first time without dealing with installation problems. I'm happy to report that this product works like a dream, with very few issues to even mention. The unit comes with a metre length UBS cable for you connect it to your computer, and after few a few moments, both my ageing laptop running XP and my desktop with Windows 7, installed it quickly and was ready for use straight away. Using the connection removal tool on both operating systems, you can disconnect it safety. Again, this takes just a few seconds. Nice and easy.
In operation, access to the drive files is quick with very little lag. This is a very good for an external drive without an independent power supply, so I was pretty impressed. Creating folders, transferring standard documents and music takes seconds depending on the file sizes. Copying picture and video files can take a little longer, and there is a small amount of delay when moving these files, even single items. This seems to mostly be for larger video files however. Both my USB flash drives are quicker, but given the vastly different memory capacities this is understandable. It also seems to have a lot more memory than it says it has. I managed to transfer the majority of the files from both my computers, around 180GB, and there still appears to be nearly half the drive available when if should be over this mark. Even though its only 320GB, there is plenty of space for making essential back up's for most regular computer users. I would suggest that if you have a lot of video files, use a larger model with a separate power supply.
Accessing the files on it is also rapid, and performs like the static hard drive in your computer with little little delay, and saving direct to the unit is exactly the same. Quick and problem free. Overall, the general performance is very good in most aspects, and perfectly fine to use as a permanent extension to the computers regular storage drives if you wish.
--Statistics--
Height - 128 mm
Width - 82 mm
Depth - 12 mm
Weight - 165g
Colour - Black
Item model number - 6003610
USB - 2.0
Disc capacity - 320 Gigabytes
Disc Size/Factor - 2.5"
Max Reading Transfer Rate - 33MB/s
Max Writing Transfer Rate - 35.5MB/s
Spindle Speed - 5400 rpm
--Conclusion--
There are a lot of portable external USB drives on the market today, and taking the cost and quality into consideration, I conclude this one is very good purchase. The look is nice and modern, the blue light is a quirky touch and while it may seem a little flimsy, if it's looked after I wouldn't think it would breakdown easily. The outer covered is maybe too delicate, but I cant really fault it on its performance. Despite being a little sluggish with large video files, overall its rather quick to transfer and access files. For a very reasonable price, you get fair bit of memory to have as a handy support to your laptop or desktop as well. For me, a good purchase.
Thanks for Reading. © Novabug
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Seagate Expansion External Drive 1 TB
by Jenny_Summers
After trying to install a game on my computer and finding I didn't have enough hard drive space I knew it was about time I upgraded my computer. The 30GB hard drive I have is pretty poor and I considered upgrading my computers internal memory. My brother-in-law knows a lot about computers so I asked his advice, he told me about external ... hard drives and said it would be a good avenue for me to explore as I would probably want to think about upgrading my entire computer soon anyway and this way all my games and documents could be stored externally and easily accessed on a new computer when I got one.
I looked online and found that Maplin were having a sale on external hard drives. The 1TB hard drive was reduced to just under £60 and a quick look on other websites told me that this was a good deal for a hard drive this size.
The hard drive came well packaged in a cardboard box with those horribly squeaky polystyrene inserts to keep it all in place. It came with an adapter, a USB 3.0 cable for very fast data transfer and also various manuals, safety leaflets and the warranty booklet. The hard drive is covered if it develops a fault, by the manufacturer, for upto 2 years. Upon removing it from the box I found the design had been given some thought and it looks quite stylish, on the front it has a single LED and the Seagate logo, the rest of the hard drive is shiny and black. It has a curved front and the back tapers inwards. It would fit in quite nicely if you owned one of those modern pretty computers (something I unfortunately don't have).
It was very easy to install, they aren't kidding when they say it's plug and play,one you plug in the power cable and connect it via the supplied USB cable, it is automatically recognized by Windows, and is compatible with XP, Vista and Windows 7. After it has installed itself you are given the option to register it with Seagate to gain access to their customer support and I believe registering it covers you if you loose your paper warranty.
A Terabyte is a vast amount of storage space and I've been steadily adding games, music, photos and documents over the past 18 months and have not come anywhere near filling it. To give you an idea of just how big it is here are some approximate sizes of things you might store on it:
- A normal deffinition movie 1 GB
-A 5 minute song 5 MB
-A 12.5 megapixel photo 2.5 MB
so in theory you could store roughly 1,000 movies or 200,000 songs or 400,000 photos. It is worth remembering though that the software that the drive uses is stored upon it and this does reduce the size slightly although only by around 50GB
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