I have had my 500GB Freecom External Hard Drive for quite a while now, and it has been a solidly good experience.

The drive came as a drive, and wasn't trying to be anything else. No fancy software, no buttons, just a USB cable, and a power cable. Plugged it in and it showed up as a blank hard drive, which was perfect. As I was only using it on Windows XP and above, I formatted it to NTFS, as it came as FAT32. I did this because I knew I would be using some of the drive for backup, so needed to get past the 4gb file size limit of FAT32.

The drive has an aluminium casing and feels very solid. There are no fans, as the casing is used as a heatsink for the drive, so can get a little warm after extended use. The hard drive inside the casing is actually a Samsung drive. As well as the drive itself being reliable however, I found that Freecom had excellent customer service.

About 3 months after I got the drive, it started having trouble spinning up, and would take a few tries. Once the power supply was warm, it was fine. Eventually, the power supply gave up, and I emailed Freecom explaining the problem. Without question, they took my address and a replacement power supply was delivered the next day free of charge, which I was very happy about.