Review: Freecom 400GB External USB Hard Drive

Iain Laskey looks at a little drive that offers a lot of capacity.

Product	400GB External USB Hard Drive
Company	Freecom
Web	www.freecom.com
Price	£85
We like	Capacity, build, bundled software, fanless design
We don't like	Can run a little hot
Rating	9/10
Requirements

Freecom offer a wide range of external storage solutions including some very affordable external USB 2.0 hard drives in a range of capacities up to 500GB. In this review we'll be looking at the 400GB version though.

The drive is currently available at PC World in the UK for a mere £85, a price which until recently was unthinkable for 400Gb of storage space.

The kit contains the hard drive itself, in a matt black finished heavy aluminium case (not silver, like our image below!) along with a USB lead, the external PSU plus a CD containing various utilities. The drive isn't much bigger than a hard drive on it's own measuring just 20x11.5x4 cms and is remarkably heavy at some 750 grams. The whole thing feels very solid with even the on/off switch at the back having a nice positive click to it. The front panel has a blue illuminated 400GB moniker to show it's powered up and also acts as a disk access indicator.

400GB might seem a lot of space and if you're using it to keep documents and MP3s, you'd probably be right. However, backup a PC or two to it or maybe drop a few movies or TV episodes on it and the space soon gets used up. All of a sudden, 400GB looks like a very sensible idea.

Being USB, installation is simply a matter of plugging it in to a spare USB socket, connecting the compact PSU (built in to the plug, not an external brick) and powering up. Both our XP and Vista test machines detected it immediately and identified it as a Freecom hard drive. By default the drive comes preformatted as FAT32 but we formatted it as NTFS before use. The drive also works fine for Mac users who may also wish to reformat it first.

We then proceeded to backup both PCs to the drive. This went without a hitch with very good speeds being achieved for a USB based device. The Freecom external hard drives have no fan and so the unit is very quiet, aided by the excellent choice of a Samsung hard drive inside. We're big fans of Samsung hard drives here at PPC and think they're very under rated so this was a big plus point. The solid case and black finish all help to dissipate heat with the result the drive does feel rather warm to the touch after a while. On a hot day we'd think it wise to put it somewhere where there's a bit of airflow although in all honesty, it's no worse than any other passively cooled external hard drives and possibly a little better because of the black coating.

Software

Freecom include a CD with some interesting software to add a bit of value to the purchase. This includes some backup software and Freecom's so called Personal Media Suite which allows you to add password protection, compression, autorunning of applications when the drive is connected and folder synchronisation. Whilst fairly basic, the software has a light footprint so puts little strain on your system and can be set to load every time you put so these features are always available. We'd say that the bundle is much more worthwhile than some of the utilities we see bundled with hardware.

Conclusion

We have to admit that we didn't expect much from this drive given the price. We were therefore very pleasantly surprised to find it was a solid and well built unit with a good speed, huge capacity and a very usable suite of software extras all for an extremely affordable price. Our only concern is the lack of fan cooling but that's also its plus point too depending on the environment it's going to be used in. Overall a great device that we can do nothing other than recommend highly.

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com