| Product: |
Freecom Hard Drive 1 TB |
| Date: |
28/08/08 (505 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Cheap, quiet, doesn't get too hot.
Disadvantages: Unable to stand vertically.
The first 'proper' computer I used didn't even have a hard drive. It had two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives from which you loaded the operating system. Then came PC's with internal hard drives, a whole 40mb if my memory serves me right. I thought I'd never fill up all that space.
These days it's easy to fill up a few gigabytes of space in the blink of an eye. I've converted a large CD collection to MP3, I have hours of home video footage, notorious for eating up space, years worth of downloads, updates, patches and god knows what else. On top of that I've got backups of everything including my Playstation 3 data.
I've upgraded internal drives on my desktop pc's many times over the years but now I mostly use a laptop and with prices of large capacity external hard drives steadily falling they seemed for me the most convenient way to go for a bit of extra storage.
Previously I'd bought a couple of Iomega 500gb external hard drives which I had been very happy with but they were filling up fast. I promised myself the next one would be a 1 terabyte (TB) drive (which is 1,000 gigabytes or 1,000,000 megabytes*) as soon as it broke the £100 mark. A few weeks back I spotted one on Play.com which did, even if it was only by a single penny.
* or is it? I'll come back to this later.
The drive I bought was a Freecom Classic 1TB USB2 External Hard Drive. It's dimensions at (W) 11.5cm (D) 20cm (H) 4cm make it only slightly larger than a thick paperback book and almost exactly the same dimensions as my 500gb drives. At 750g it is quite heavy and is best placed on a hard flat surface during use.
On the model I bought the drive casing is completely black. When switched on a single blue led displayed on the front of the drive indicates the drives capacity (1TB) and flickers when the drive is accessed. The front is completely flat but while it's not as sleek and stylish as some other drives it's not completely unpleasant to look at. It retails around £149.99 but is a more agreeable £99.99 on Play.com at the time of writing. The full technical specifications can be found at the end of this review.
In the box you get the drive itself, a power adaptor, a usb cable, a CD containing the manual in pdf form (which is also available on the hard drive itself) and a printed quick start guide. It's preformatted with a single FAT32 partition, meaning it will work straight out of the box with Windows 2000 (or later) and Mac OSX 10.3 (or later) and Playstation 3's for that matter. If you have Windows 98 it should still work but you'll first need to install a driver for it which can be downloaded from the Freecom website (www.freecom.com). Then you can plug in the power lead, attach the USB cable, flick the switch on the rear of the drive and you are good to go.
I haven't owned a Freecom drive before but have been very impressed with this one, to the extent I bought a second one soon after. It's a fanless design which means it's very quiet, indeed it's much quieter than my 500gb Iomega drives. It also doesn't seem to generate as much heat as my old drives, even after extended periods of heavy use it still remains only slightly warm.
The drive casing seems quite robust and able to take a few knocks although obviously I wouldn't recommend it. My Iomega drives came with a separate plastic stand which could be used to hold the drive on it's side which was a nice touch - when vertical they took up less than half the desk space. These drives do not but they are advertised as stackable. That's something I wasn't keen on until I realised how little heat they gave off and I have to say I have been running them stacked recently with no noticeable problems regarding heat or performance.
By external hard drive standards it is a basic drive. It only has a USB2 (Hi Speed USB) connection although it will work, albeit slower, with USB1 connections. Other external drives have faster connections (such as firewire) the ability to connect to networks or wireless features but obviously these all come at a price.
Generally speaking external hard drives connected via USB shouldn't be used as a replacement for your internal drives, in other words don't run any data intensive processes directly from them because they are simply not fast enough. However, for things like music or video storage or for backups they are ideal.
Despite quoting the 480mbps maximum transfer speed on the packaging this is only the theoretical speed for USB2 transfer. Actual transfer speeds will always be much less. I'm mainly using the drive attached to a laptop with Vista installed and moving a single 700mb file from the laptop to the Freecom drive typically takes about 50 seconds. There are faster drives available and I did spend several hours that first weekend I bought it transferring all the data from my 500gb drives to this one but then speed wasn't a primary concern of mine when choosing the drive although it's certainly comparable to other 1tb and 500gb drives in a similar price range.
Obviously the one thing I can't comment on yet is reliability over the longer term but many of the reviews I've come across on the net regarding other Freecom drives indicate very few problems in general. The drive comes with a one year manufacturers warranty and unlimited free helpdesk support - and it's not premium rate. I've only been using the drives for a few weeks and while they have had heavy use during that time there are certainly no signs of any problems as of yet. I'll update this review if anything crops up.
The one final thing I want to mention is something that applies to all hard drives, not just this one, and it's something that often confuses people. You've bought a 1tb (1000gb) drive but when you plug it in the computer tells you the capacity is only 931gb so what's going on? For those that a) understand such things or b) don't care feel free to skip to the end of the review. For those who are interested I'll try to explain.
This problem arises from having two ways of measuring memory. A drive sold as 1 terabyte will have one trillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). We use the decimal system which works in units of 10's, 100's, 1000's and so on. In the decimal world a kilobyte would be 1,000 bytes, a megabyte 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte 1,000,000,000 and a terabyte 1,000,000,000,000.
Unfortunately computers use the binary system. Instead of units of 10, 100, 1000 etc binary units come in the following flavours - 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on. When the units of memory reached 1024 bytes computer users referred to it as a kilobyte and that's where the confusion starts. Non computer users assumed that meant a nice round 1000 bytes but, in fact, the computer is actually using slightly more (1024) bytes.
So when a computer states sizes in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes it's using the binary system (in multiples of 1024) whereas hard drive manufacturers and, to be fair, most people in day to day use use decimal.
Decimal
1 Kilobyte = 1,000 bytes
1 Megabyte = 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000,000 bytes
1 terabyte = 1000 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Binary
1 Kilobyte = 1,024 bytes
1 Megabyte = 1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,842 bytes
1 terabyte = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
Still not convinced? Call up the properties for your hard drive and Windows will helpfully list the capacity in both bytes and gigabytes. Keep in mind that even a freshly formatted hard drive won't have a full one trillion bytes available as the file system itself takes up some space. For example my 1 terabyte hard drive shows a capacity of 999,958,085,632 bytes or 931gb.
This is why there will always be a discrepancy between a stated capacity and what Windows tells you there is. And obviously the bigger the drive capacity the more noticeable the difference. So a drive sold as 1tb or 1000gb shows up on the computer as 931gb and a drive sold as 500gb shows up as around 465gb on the computer. Annoying? Yes, but either way you are getting 1,000,000,000,000 bytes for you money however anyone refers to it.
Now the maths lesson is over it's time to summarise. It may not be the quickest or most feature packed drive available but it's neat and compact, very quite and doesn't get excessively hot. For £100 it's a bit of a bargain for this much storage space although memory prices do seem to fall quite quickly - just over a year ago your £100 would have only bought you a 500gb drive. Long term reliability is something only time will prove but in the meantime, unable to find a bad thing to say about it, I can do nothing but highly recommend it.
And just think. With all that money you've saved buying this model you could splash out on a fancy calculator to help with all those decimal to binary conversions.
Thanks for reading
© Nomad 2008
Specifications
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Freecom Classic 1terabyte USB2 External Hard Drive
RRP £150 (available for £99.99 on Play.com)
Capacity - 1 terabyte
File System - FAT32 (1 partition)
Type - 3.5 inch , 7200rpm/min, 8mb cache, low noise, low power consumption
Interface - USB2.0 can also be connected to USB1.1
Data transfer rate - Max 480mbit/s (USB2.0)
Dimensions 20 x 11.5 x 4 cm
Weight 750gr
One year manufacturers warranty and unlimited free heldesk support
Minimum System Requirements
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Intel pentium III / AMD Duron 900mhz or higher
Windows 2000/XP/Vista
256mb ram (Vista 512mb) CR-ROM drive, available USB port
Powermac G3/G4/G5, Powerbook G3/G4 or Intel Mac,
Mac OS X v10.3 or higher
256mb ram or higher, CD-ROM drive, available USB port
Examples Of Storage Capacity
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680,00 0 digital photos (assuming 1.5mb per photo)
200,000 mp3 tracks (assuming 5mb per track)
220 DVD Movies (assuming 4.5gb per movie)
Related Websites
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Official Freecom Website.
www.Freecom.com
Play.com.
http://www.play.com/ (then search for 'freecom 1tb' - Unfortunately I am unable to post the direct link as it's longer than 80 characters)
Summary: Great value external hard drive storage.
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