Buffalo DriveStation 2.0TB USB 2.0 External Hard Disk Drive

I run Mac OS X Lion, and am using this drive for Time Machine backups.
Reliable 2TB disk drive, no errors at all so far, fingers crossed. Also it is very slim, doesn't take up much space. It is also very quiet, only occasionally you hear it click on and off.

The box says it's made in Japan. Which is always reassuring.

ordered this as a backup disc to use with my macbook pro and time machine,excellent,unpacked,plugged in,worked within a minute,true 2 tb space available,it is running nice and quiet in the background.excellent value for money too
recommend it highly

I looked through reviews on Amazon and elsewhere of a lot of external hard drives and there was a very similar range for all of them: 80-90% four or five stars and fully satisfied, 10-20% one star with horror stories. Just a few had 30% bad reviews and I excluded them. But even those with the very best comments and largest percentage of excellent reviews still got some stinkers and strident complaints. Nothing was a clear winner. Obviously all external hard drives carry some risk of failure. Particular brands (even word-leaders) are no guarantee. It's just luck.

Apart from the basic percentage of stright-out product failure, the worst reviews seemed to come from those people who had the most specific requirements, often known in advance to be going to necessitate some modification of the product as supplied; or with a complaint involving the need to do so to achieve a personal objective. I wanted a bog-standard external hard drive for backing up a large quantity of data on my PC, having lost valuable records in the past through irremediable PC hard disc failure. Once things have been copied I don't expect to use the external hard drive very much, or very often. My PC is quite new, but is UBS 2.0, so I didn't want the complications (or cost) of any USB 3.0 facility. I accept that there will be speed limitations with UBS 2.0. I did need a large size - two 1TB drives, or one 2TB or larger drive was required. Obviously the cost and convenience of a 2TB drive made it preferable to two 1TB drives, and the reviews did not suggest any satisfaction differences across sizes (although performance might not be as fast).

I chose the Buffalo drive because of its size, spec and cost. It was, as far as I could see, one of the best value in terms of bytes per pound. I did not need it to be travel-hardy or high speed.

The Buffalo drive arrived in excellent time, and was exactly as described. It took no time at all to have it up and working. There was nothing complicated about operation. It has performed exactly as required, with no special formatting or other software related issues. I have now copied across all the files I needed to back up, and am storing the drive on the shelf. It has taken a week to do it, a few hours at a time, but I needed to make decisions about what to copy, and create new directories for the material, anyway so that was not a problem. I have opened some of the files copied onto the external drive for various reasons, and this random check shows no errors or access difficulties; I have also moved files around on the drive, and back and forth bewtween the drive and my PC, copying, cutting, pasting and renaming etc without any problems.

I found this product met my needs and was excellent value. To my eyes it looked nice enough; storing it is no problem. I can only say that if you need something very tough, clever, fast, pretty or small, it might not be a good choice for you and to look into more costly and specialised products.