BUSLink L-80 External USB 1.1 5400 RPM 80 GB Hard Drive

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good once you get it working
Review: I've been using my BUSLink 80GB USB hard drive for a few weeks now, and overall I feel that it is an adequate product. I selected this particular model primarily to store my music collection in a format that is easy to bring back and forth between home and office. Neither my home nor office PC's are exactly cutting edge, so I needed something with USB 1.1. Apparently 2.0 is considerably faster, so if you have it that's probably the way to go. Also in favor of the 80 GB BUSLink was the fact that it has a good "cost per gig" ratio.
Setting it up proved to be a challenge. The instructions that it comes with are woefully inadequate and the BUSLink web site has very little support information. Basically, they claim that you install the driver, plug it in, and away you go. In actuality it required that I wrestle with it for several days, try three different drivers (one included and two from their site), and use the Windows Disk Management tool to configure the drive before it was usable. I finally got it going on my work PC, which is currently running Windows 2000. Prior to this I had tried setting it up on my home PC (also Win2k) with no luck, but once I got it going on the work machine the home PC decided it liked it.
Support from BUSLink was mediocre. I sent them an email and didn't hear back for about four days. By the time they got back to me I had already figured it out on my own. They told me it wouldn't work on my home PC since it had a SCSI drive, which I had already proved to be incorrect.
All that said, once I worked through all these issues it proved to be up to the task. Performance is good enough that you can play MP3's right off of it. It still worked fine with a shared drive on it and a second PC playing MP3's simultaneously. Windows 2000 will complain that you didn't stop the device correctly if you unplug it (even though it is not available as a removable device to stop), but this doesn't seem to cause any problems. Curiously though, I can do this fine on the home PC, but I need to reboot the work PC to get it working after I plug it back in.
Allegedly a lot of these problems are cleared up with XP, but I tried it on an XP machine first and it didn't work on that either. In summary, this is a decent product for someone who is technically inclined and doesn't mind spending some time setting it up.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible hard drive - BSOD in windows 2k
Review: This drive has terrible problems installing and running in a windows 2000 environment. The company offers little to no support. The product worked for a while in a stable production environment, then one day it started blue screening the computer, and it has not worked since, in its original system, or three others wher installation was attempted. It may be that a recent MS windows update broke the USB 1.1 drivers, but right now the drivers are continously being recognized improperly as a scsi device.