Buslink 20 GB External USB Hard Drive for PC

Rating:
Summary: *grumble*
Review: I bought the Buslink 20GB USB harddrive around last Christmas, thinking it would be a great way to shuttle my dance-music .MP3 habit between work and home.

I got home, and following the instructions that came with the drive, I installed the driver, then plugged the drive in. Lo and behold, it worked. And it worked fine. The only problem with it was the fact that none of the access lights on the front were functioning at all, so I decided to swap it with another.

The replacement drive I got, I plugged into my Dell, and turned everything on. The Dell then booted to the <DELL> power on screen, but wouldn't get anywhere on the Power on Self Test. I found that by turning the buslink drive off, the memory test would start up, and if I turned the buslink drive on mid-memory test, the computer would crash.

So I thought this was just a problem with my system - it turns out that every PC (work Compaq, work Dell, friend's Dell) I tried this on, the Buslink would kill the power-on-self-test every time. I tried swapping this drive out for another one. Here's what happened-

Third: same thing Fourth: same thing Fifth: same thing

I tried calling and emailing customer support, and they said that it wasn't their problem, that it was something wrong with my PC, and I would have to call the manufacturer.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfied with BUSLink
Review: I have been using BUSLink USB hard drive for over a year without any problems/incidents. I have moved it back and forth between laptop and desktop and different OS's without incident.

Rating:
Summary: Does what you need
Review: I have one word for you with this product. Backup. This hard drive is specifically for backup. I have backed up my hard drive many times with it. If there is something wrong with it or it crashes, its your computer, not the device. Amen.

Rating:
Summary: Does what you need
Review: I have one word for you with this product. Backup. This hard drive is specifically for backup. I have backed up my hard drive many times with it. If there is something wrong with it or it crashes, its your computer, not the device. Amen.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfied with Purchase
Review: I've used the Buslink for several months with no problems on a W98 machine. Installs easily. I was concerned because of the bad reviews, but decided to try for myself anyway since the price was good.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfied with Purchase
Review: I've used the Buslink for several months with no problems on a W98 machine. Installs easily. I was concerned because of the bad reviews, but decided to try for myself anyway since the price was good.

Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: If you like a slow drive that crashes often, this is the drive for you. It can transfer "up to" 8mb a second. Save a 6 mb file, you are looking at about 2 minutes. Reminds me when I had a 286-16 with a whole meg of ram and a 45 meg HD. This drive is a joke. Perhaps firewire or USB drive is an improvement, but even if it was twice as fast, this would still be a joke. That same file to my internal IDE saves the same 6 mb file in about 1-2 seconds. Life is too short to wait on this piece of junk!

Rating:
Summary: Junk
Review: If you like a slow drive that crashes often, this is the drive for you. It can transfer "up to" 8mb a second. Save a 6 mb file, you are looking at about 2 minutes. Reminds me when I had a 286-16 with a whole meg of ram and a 45 meg HD. This drive is a joke. Perhaps firewire or USB drive is an improvement, but even if it was twice as fast, this would still be a joke. That same file to my internal IDE saves the same 6 mb file in about 1-2 seconds. Life is too short to wait on this piece of junk!

Rating:
Summary: Short version: Corrupt data on Win98 & System crash on Win2k
Review: Long version: Bought a Buslink 20GB USB external hard drive when my 13GB internal hard drive could no longer keep up with my mp3 habit. Based on its transfer rate and storage capicity (not to mention its extreme portability) I thought, Great! and I ordered it.

Installing the drive was a snap. I was using Windows 98SE at the time and the supplimental disk that came with the drive loaded fine. I plugged the drive in and zap, it appeared under My Computer like it was born there. I dragged a folder on to it and zip, it copied in pretty good time (about 50MB in 30 sec). Great, I thought and MOVED (not copied) some of my backed up info (application settings etc...) on to the drive. Again, no problem. Then I moved a music folder (with perhpas 1.5GB worth of mp3s). I left it to copy...

When I got back there was a error message on the screen saying there was a read error transfering a file and after clicking OK it finished moving the files. I thought the problem might be long file names so I thought whatever. Then when I looked on the drive all the folder names were screwed up with 'My Do0__$32#s' instaed of 'My Documents.' I tried to open that folder and it told me that it did not exist. Same with the other folders or some would let me open the to find the same problem within the sub folders. I also could not copy stuff back on to my internal hard drive, getting a sharing violation or something.

I went to Buslink's website and made sure I had all the right software but nothing seemed to work. I emailed tech support and heard back in a few hours telling me that the problem was with the windows backup utility. After telling them that I was simply dragging and dropping I was told to reformat the drive which I did. Things looked good again. I could drag small things to the drive. Unfortunatly when I dragged a bigger folder (300MB) on the problems began all over again.

I called tech support and we tried to repartition the drive which ended up making it invisible and unreadable. After being on the phone for 45min or so tech support said "Good luck, you can send us the drive to fix or return it to the merchant you bought it from."

Needless to say I returned it.

After working 2 year in computer technical support I'm pretty sure it was not user error but the product that caused the problem. After losing a good abount of data I bought a 45GB internal hard drive and am very happy with it. My brother-in-law got my old 13gig drive.

Beware...

P.S. I also tried to get it going on Windows 2000 Pro. After loading the drivers successfully I turned on the drive and it crashed my computer like it was pulling the plug on it.