Iogear 80GB FIREWIRE + USB 2.0 HD ( GHE135C80 )

Rating:
Summary: This works great!
Review: My laptop hard drive crashed a year ago and although we've been backing our files up since then, the size of our files had gotten to the point where using cd's were just a pain. So an external hard drive was a good solution and also offered the additional flexibility of backing up the entire system.

My comments are as follows: 1) This is probably way more memory then I need, but given the incremental expense of going from the 40GB model to the 80GB model, I figured it was better to have and not need, then... 2) This drive is quiet! I need to put my hand on it to make sure it's really running because you can't hear it over the computer. 3) It has it's own on/off button so you don't have to leave it on all the time. 4) I have Windows XP (Home) and it was truly plug and play. 5) It comes FAT formatted, which resulted in 3 partitions when I installed it. It takes a little time to reformat it to NTSF and to change the partitions, but it's really not a big deal. If I were the manufacture, I would pre-format it the same way since earlier versions of Windows can use FAT but not NTSF. 6)Given my experience of my original hard drive crashing and reviews of alternate drives, dependability was a big issue. I figured that Iogear's 3 year warranty was a great proxy for this evaluation. Some other drives out there actually have 90 day warranties...no way I was going to touch those models!