I bought this hard drive a while ago for a couple of reasons. Initially I needed somewhere to back up my pc while I was flattening the system and reinstalling the OS. I also decided it was the perfect place to store all my music and photos etc without eating too much into my pc's internal hard drive. This also made it incredibly easy to share photos etc with the rest of my family as this hard drive is small and portable and could be easily moved between all our computers. I now store a lot of things on this drive which makes it much easier to do maintenance, installs etc without the need to back everything up again or risk losing it. Obviously this also means that if I am unlucky enough to get a virus or do something stupid on my pc, I don't accidentally lose all my important stuff.

My first pc had a 20GB hard drive so a whole TB seemed huge. Luckily it is more than plenty for me but much bigger drives are now available should you need it. At just £62.71, with free postage, from Amazon I think this is a good buy.

It has a sleek black design and is small enough to fit comfortable on or under my computer desk. I generally leave it plugged into my pc, but turned off when not in use, to make it even easier to use. I feel it would benefit from having non-slip feet as the ones it has are just plastic. This is not generally a problem but I would feel better knowing it couldn't be knocked off my tower, which is where it usually sits. It is a very solid piece of kit which still looks as good as new and has never given me any problems.

It is incredibly easy to use. Plug it into the wall, connect via USB then follow instructions. Anything that easy and useful has got to be a good addition to our hardware stock.

The technical bit:
Transfer rate: up to 480Mbits / second
Rotational Speed: 7200rpm
Cache: 8MB or greater
Hi-speed USB 2.0 interface

I didn't really see the point of an external hard drive until I bought this one, but now i wouldn't be without it. All my files etc are safe, as it's not always switched on and open to attack, I don't have to worry about extra back ups when installing anything on my pc and any software programmes that are used by the whole family can be found on my hard drive and shared quickly and easily.

I have trusted Verbatim with other products and this one didn't let me down.