~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ IN FIVE YEARS TIME... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Several years ago, after much deliberation and painstaking research, I made a very astute purchase for my new Dell desktop PC. Forking out £150 for an external, powered, 250GB hard drive seemed an excellent investment, and so it has proved. The reason for buying it, at the time, was to have a quick and easy back-up facility for all of the precious, irreplaceable files on my PC, particularly photos and files. This venerable old Maxtor drive is still doing the business, tucked away unobtrusively behind my PC monitor. Technically, it is portable, but in reality it is anything but - it ...  Read the complete review

I bought this hard drive as a back up storage device so that I could put my computer back to factory settings to get rid of a few bugs. I found it in a sale at Argos for £35 which I thought was a great deal, it also came with a handy protective case. The box is quite small, about the size of a large men's wallet. It has a little light that shows it is on and also runs very quietly. The drive was very easy to use, I just plugged it was instantly found as a storage device on my computer. I collected all my files and just dragged and dropped them into the Seagate file box. The files took a little while to transfer over; this was to be expected when moving the 250 ...  Read the complete review

This is an amazing product and at 49.95 its a pretty good deal too !! I keep all my photos,music, videos and any files i can't afford to lose on this gem. To give you an idea of how much space 500GB is, it stores 160,000 digital photos or 12,497 hours of digital music (MP3) or 500 hours of digital video. It does come in 250 and 320GB and the bigger 1 or 1.5TB but the latter 2 require you to plug the drive into a wall socket while its being used whereas the portable does not. This makes it great to use while you're on long plane or train journeys. This Seagate 500GB portable drive is very light, the stats put it at 1kg but it feels much lighter ...  Read the complete review

So this product was bought around three years ago now for my dad to back up his computer onto. At the time this was one of the cheapest good quality brand HDD's available that stored a reasonable amount of data so we went for it. Delightfully it is still working today and takes pride of place next to his computer. ---OUT OF THE BOX--- After purchasing this on the internet from play.com it arrived all packaged up and I was eager to open it. After my dad beating me to the door we opened the box and saw a very shiny black HDD that really looked the part. Nowadays this product is slightly large in comparison with other HDD's on the market (14.1 x 8 x ...  Read the complete review

It performs exactly as I hoped and worked straight out of the box, as soon as I plugged it in by the single USB2 cable provided. The cable is a little on the short side but replacing it with another - say 1 metre long - is both very inexpensive and easy. Installation is unbelievably easy because there is no installation! You just plug it into your machine and straight away it is detected as a storage device and is ready to go. A proper plug and play which is perfect for me as a non technical person. The drive does not have to be formatted. My only grumble is that the supplied USB cable is a little short, as mentioned above. As soon as the drive is ...  Read the complete review