Seagate (ST3160203U2-RK) 160 GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Pros: Compact, east to install, hot swappable, affordable.
Cons: You only get 150 GB usable space.

I think it’s been a good twelve years now since I bought my first computer. In that time, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of stuff-music files, image files, scanned photos, word documents, videos, and more. In short, lots of personal files that I ...

Pros: Works perfectly. Quick and reliable.
Cons: Bigger, faster and cheaper drives are available

With external hard drives the important traits are ease of use, performance and reliability. You want your drive to be easy to get working, and you want it to then work without requiring any attention. Ease of Use and Setup I formatted my ...

Pros: Quiet, easy to use
Cons: a bit bulky at the base

I was running out of space. I had previously purchased a Western Digital external and it was running low on space too. I purchased this one because a friend recommended Seagate as the leader in Hard Drives. So far, it does everything I want it to: it holds stuff. I wish I could make this product sound more exciting than that, but so far it has done everything I've asked it to do: store stuff.

DISCLAIMER: My usage of external hard drives is relatively limited. Over the course of a week I'll have it turned on maybe three times, for a few hours or so. So I have not subjected it to the heavy usage that most other users probably have. I am very wary of 'over-using' an external HD, or using it just like another internal one. Of course I don't have much evidence that constant usage is what can cause HD failure: I'm just reporting that my usage of this product is low.

Seagate boasts good reliability and a good price, so until this product doesn't store stuff like I want it to, it makes the grade.

Pros: Looks nice.
Cons: Cannot install driver only. No support for this hard drive on Seagate website.

This hard drive comes with a CD to install a bunch of unknown software on your computer. There is no option to install the driver only.

The hard drive will work with the default Microsoft driver, but you will not be able to safely remove it if you have it configured to "optimize for performance". In other words, you can either make it fast and not unpluggable, or slow and unpluggable.

The CDROM that comes with this hard drive has no .INF file, so you can't install the driver only. Furthermore, and get this, there is no support for this hard drive on Seagate's website. If you search for either model number printed on the hard drive, nothing comes up.

Lame.