Labs

The Freecom is an unusual shape, being wider than it's long, but its clean aluminium case will sit nicely on your desk without drawing undue attention. It does make one concession to showiness: when you access the drive, an LED lights up reading '500GB'. If it showed the actual amount of space remaining, that would be really

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clever, but it doesn't.

The Hard Drive Pro's unique feature is the Sync Button, which will automatically synchronise the files on the drive and your PC with a single press. It's certainly handy if you use the drive for moving frequently updated files around, but sadly you can't reconfigure the button to do anything else. It would have been nice if you could use it to run your preferred backup software or carry out some other task. And it only works if you leave the Freecom Transfer Manager software running all the time.

In our USB speed tests, the Freecom kept pace with the pack, though it's clearly better at reading than writing. When we switched to eSATA its results were near the top of the rankings, though it couldn't quite match the Iomega.

There's nothing wrong with the Hard Drive Pro, but the Sync Button isn't really enough to set it apart. The price, too, is fair but unremarkable.