Hitachi LifeStudio Desk 2TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive 0S02666 (Black) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Maybe for some people this would be a great external.I could see some people liking it, but not me.
First, the hard drive is more like a second computer.It will do pretty much everything, from storing your pictures and video to surfing the web.That's right the external will surf the web for you.I get that it is a cool feature, but it's not what I want when I buy an extra hard drive to store information.

Second, and this is what really did it for me and made me return it.When you search for items on the drive (pictures, music, video...) instead of searching like you might when you open the C: drive, it searches by tabs along a wall.So you scroll along the wall until you find what you want.Which in itself isn't horrible, but there is no fast way to search, if you are looking for one item, say the Beatles, if you scroll there is no way to tell you have gone to far or not far enough without continually stopping and looking.In order to be able to see the whole wall close up you can not have more than three rows.Which, once again is fine if you don't have a lot of music.As soon as you have lots of music imagine trying to scroll through a wall, while still being able to see what your doing, when you have thousands of tabs to pick through.It would take forever and defeats the point.

Finally, the only good thing, and in my opinion is also a bad thing, is that the drive is essentially a back-up of your computer.Meaning whenever it is hooked up it is backing up your computer.I found no easy way to load my music onto the hard drive without also having to load it onto my computer. Which is exactly what i didn't want to do.I don't want two exact copies of my computer hard drive, I want to keep as much free space on my computer so it runs fast and move all my music onto the hard drive.Maybe there is a way to do this, but I never figured it out, as such am returning it and am extremely disappointed.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Hitachi LifeStudio Desk 2TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive 0S02666 (Black)

Product Description:
The LifeStudio Desk external drive gives you plenty of capacity to easily find, automatically organize, share, and protect all your digital content.

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Seagate Expansion 2.0 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I can't speak to the issues that some of the other reviewers have had, but I have to say I've been very impressed by this drive.You've got to plug it in so it's not really an "on-the-go" kind of drive, but that's not what I needed.I have a couple of FreeAgent Go drives for that (and the reason I went with Seagate this time is because I've been so impressed with the other Seagates).This time, I wanted a big drive that I could use as a Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro, and as a backup for all of the video files I've shot over the years.So far I've been very happy with this drive.One thing I noted right away is that it actually has slightly more than 1TB of space!With every other external drive I've ever used the actual amount of usable memory has been a bit less than advertised, even after I've reformatted them.With this one you get what is advertised.It's a USB 2.0 data connection, and from what I've seen manages to move files more quickly than my older Western Digital 500GB desktop firewire drive.

For comparison, I tried moving a 2.15 GB video file back and forth between my laptop's hard drive and a few of my external drives.This one was fastest at both downloads and uploads - it would download the 2.15 GB file in one minute, 17 s. as opposed to 1 min., 40 for the portable FreeAgent Go and 1 min., 37 for the Western Digital.Uploading results were similar: it would upload the same 2.15 GB video file in 1 minute, 10 s. while the other drives uploaded in about 1 minute, 20 s.So, it's pretty fast and does exactly what I need - I've got no complaints and am very happy about the price (which turns out to be almost exactly what I paid a year or so ago for my 320GB portable drive and much less than what I paid about 3 years ago for my 500 GB desktop drive).What's not to like?

One more thing, for Mac users.While this drive is set up out of the factory to plug and play on Windows it can easily be converted to a handy Mac drive.Here's how:

1. plug it in to your Mac, using the USB 2.0 cable provided with the drive

2. open up your applications folder, search for the utilities folder and then run "disk utility" (or, just search for "disk utility" in finder or spotlight and click on it).

3. you should see an icon for your "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" drive in the left column of "disk utility" and also a drive partition (as I recall it was called "desktop" but I changed the name) underneath that.

4. click on the icon labelled "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" and you'll see a few options in the window; click "partition"

5. after this steps will vary depending on what you want to do with this.For what I wanted, I decided to create two partitions on my hard drive.So, under "volume scheme" I selected "2 partitions" then clicked on the top one and set it to 250 GB and that left 750.10 GB on the other one.For the "format" I selected "Mac OS X Extended" but you'd want to select the journaled option if you want to use either of these drives as a "boot disk".I didn't.Then hit "apply" and it will erase everything on the disk and break it into two sections.

Now when you plug in the hard drive two icons will appear on your desktop, as if there were two separate external drives.I use the smaller one for regular backups and the larger one for storing all of my old video files.I'm sure there are lots of other ways to get an excellent value from this sleek and handy little drive.Enjoy!

Click Here to see more reviews about: Seagate Expansion 2.0 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK

Product Description:
Seagate external desktop drives provide extra storage for your ever-growing collection of files. Instantly add space for more files, consolidate all of your files to a single location, or free-up space on your computer's internal drive for improved performance. Set-up is straightforward, simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by Windows operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too, just drag-and-drop.It's not just easy to use, but it's fast and energy efficient too. Built-in power management ensures energy-efficient operation.

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Seagate Expansion 2.0 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I can't speak to the issues that some of the other reviewers have had, but I have to say I've been very impressed by this drive.You've got to plug it in so it's not really an "on-the-go" kind of drive, but that's not what I needed.I have a couple of FreeAgent Go drives for that (and the reason I went with Seagate this time is because I've been so impressed with the other Seagates).This time, I wanted a big drive that I could use as a Time Machine backup for my MacBook Pro, and as a backup for all of the video files I've shot over the years.So far I've been very happy with this drive.One thing I noted right away is that it actually has slightly more than 1TB of space!With every other external drive I've ever used the actual amount of usable memory has been a bit less than advertised, even after I've reformatted them.With this one you get what is advertised.It's a USB 2.0 data connection, and from what I've seen manages to move files more quickly than my older Western Digital 500GB desktop firewire drive.

For comparison, I tried moving a 2.15 GB video file back and forth between my laptop's hard drive and a few of my external drives.This one was fastest at both downloads and uploads - it would download the 2.15 GB file in one minute, 17 s. as opposed to 1 min., 40 for the portable FreeAgent Go and 1 min., 37 for the Western Digital.Uploading results were similar: it would upload the same 2.15 GB video file in 1 minute, 10 s. while the other drives uploaded in about 1 minute, 20 s.So, it's pretty fast and does exactly what I need - I've got no complaints and am very happy about the price (which turns out to be almost exactly what I paid a year or so ago for my 320GB portable drive and much less than what I paid about 3 years ago for my 500 GB desktop drive).What's not to like?

One more thing, for Mac users.While this drive is set up out of the factory to plug and play on Windows it can easily be converted to a handy Mac drive.Here's how:

1. plug it in to your Mac, using the USB 2.0 cable provided with the drive

2. open up your applications folder, search for the utilities folder and then run "disk utility" (or, just search for "disk utility" in finder or spotlight and click on it).

3. you should see an icon for your "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" drive in the left column of "disk utility" and also a drive partition (as I recall it was called "desktop" but I changed the name) underneath that.

4. click on the icon labelled "1 TB Seagate Desktop Media" and you'll see a few options in the window; click "partition"

5. after this steps will vary depending on what you want to do with this.For what I wanted, I decided to create two partitions on my hard drive.So, under "volume scheme" I selected "2 partitions" then clicked on the top one and set it to 250 GB and that left 750.10 GB on the other one.For the "format" I selected "Mac OS X Extended" but you'd want to select the journaled option if you want to use either of these drives as a "boot disk".I didn't.Then hit "apply" and it will erase everything on the disk and break it into two sections.

Now when you plug in the hard drive two icons will appear on your desktop, as if there were two separate external drives.I use the smaller one for regular backups and the larger one for storing all of my old video files.I'm sure there are lots of other ways to get an excellent value from this sleek and handy little drive.Enjoy!

Click Here to see more reviews about: Seagate Expansion 2.0 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK

Product Description:
Seagate external desktop drives provide extra storage for your ever-growing collection of files. Instantly add space for more files, consolidate all of your files to a single location, or free-up space on your computer's internal drive for improved performance. Set-up is straightforward, simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by Windows operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too, just drag-and-drop.It's not just easy to use, but it's fast and energy efficient too. Built-in power management ensures energy-efficient operation.

Get 29% OFF

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