Hitachi LS-1000-EMEA 3.5-inch 1TB Simpledrive External USB Hard Drive

I bought one of these to support an external 750GB RAID set up (3 drives bodged together, in effect) that stores all of our personal data - pictures, music, documents, etc. and quickly changed my mind... in a good way!

The drive is small and neat, and automatically appears on the Mac OSX desktop with a getting started guide - a nice touch for non-technical users. I formatted the drive (choosing to zero out the data - to make sure the whole disk was OK - which took 10 hours! A normal format is a matter of minutes, but doesn't check the whole drive) and backed up our data to it.
The copy process was relatively quick (pretty typical USB2.0 to USB2.0 transfer speeds; some 500GB in about 6 hours) - and was very quiet, particularly when compared to the existing drives.
The base has a blue light on each side which flashes when the drive is accessed - not too obtrusive, but it would be nice to be able to turn it down or off.

In any case, after a day or so of use, I decided to get a second drive - to replace the old setup. I've got the two drives side-by-side, set up to "mirror" each other (using the Mac OS RAID functionality in Disk Utility); this isn't a backup solution as such - but it provides protection if (WHEN!) a drive fails, as the data is duplicated. If one drive breaks down, then I can just replace it and carry on without any loss.
On top of this, the drives come with a 3 year warranty from Hitachi, so between that, the data mirroring, and the Time Machine automatic backup process, I'm pretty well covered. Unless the building burns down, in which case I'd need offsite storage too. Hmm - maybe I should buy another to leave in a drawer at work?

All in all, a great purchase so far - time will tell how reliable the disk is, and how good Hitachi's warranty process is - and at this price, an absolute steal; it seems that every time I buy a new hard disk, they've doubled in capacity and halved in price... not that I'm complaining :)

I've recently bought this drive for use on a home PC that I also use as as server to the other PCs in the house.

As others have said, the drive looks smart, remains cool to the touch, and powers down when connected PC is shutdown (it automatically powers on again when the PC is restarted).

However, I will now talk about the software that comes with this drive.

The software can be installed on any PC that can 'see' the drive either locally connected on your network. It allow you to do both a full backup or an incremental backup. In order to keep my home PCs secured, I have done a full backup of all of them (it was fastest to use a wired connection for this over the network as wireless can be a bit slow for very large volumes of data) and now all machines are set to do an automatic incremental backup every Friday night (when I leave all machines on to do their weekly virus scan and, now, their weekly backup).

When you backup you, naturally, have the choice about what folders you want backed-up.

To restore, you can either use the provided software, or access the files directly on this drive as it is all pretty obvious where they have been stored and the folder structure.

Overall, a good drive with simple and effective backup software.

So, why you ask, only four stars and not the full 5 stars? Well, the drive does seem to be a bit noisier than I would have expected and you can hear the head rumbling around when the drive is being accessed. It's nothing serious, but it might be an irritation if the drive is right next to your laptop when you're trying to concentrate on music or a film. You decide!

So fours stars it is then.

He liked the look, he liked the price. I shook my head.

In less than a week - beep click click, beep click click, beep click click.....
and another Hitachi bites the dust.

I've taken a look and we have another case of Hitachi drive failure that I've seen too many times.

Granted Hitachi's failure rate with this drive seems to have improved since previous models, but it still seems like at least 10% go bad within days. While I will always expect some failures are inevitable, Hitachi is too still high to get my vote. I'll stay with WD until they manage to improve further as I just can't trust them