Freecom Hard Drive XL review

Freecom's Hard Drive XL certainly lives up to its name: at 3.2kg it's the heaviest desktop drive this month by a considerable margin - 1.8kg, to be precise.

However, we're hard-pressed to see where the extra weight has been put to good use. While the Freecom feels sturdy enough, most of the other desktop drives we've seen this month are more than adequate for sitting on a desk. They also take up less room and, more often than not, weigh a lot less. The Hard Drive XLis not a drive you'll want to sling in your bagtoo frequently.

The extra space given over to the Freecom's excessive dimensions doesn't pay dividends in terms of extra features, either. Like many others the Hard Drive XL offers only a single USB interface - there's no eSATA or FireWire here, and the 7,200rpm hard disk, complete with a 16MB cache, is par for the course among the products on test.

You'll be spending a significant chunk of cash for these standard features, too. At £111, the Freecom is the dearest 1TB drive in the Labs this month, with the LaCie and Maxtor drives much cheaper. However, when you work out the cost per gigabyte it's actually pretty reasonable - 11.1p puts it in fourth place in that respect.

As USB drives go, performance was fairly standard. While it wasn't the quickest in any of our tests, it didn't lag far behind: it was only a tenth of a second behind the LaCie, for instance, when writing our 650MB file, with other results following this trend.

This decent performance, though, isn't enough to rescue the Freecom. A distinct lack of features and bulky, unhelpful design grate when you consider the relatively high price.

Author: Mike Jennings