Product Reviews

Hypertec's Firestorm 160GB external USB desktop hard disk looks sleek and feels sturdy thanks to its brushed metal case. The Firestorm did very well in our file transfer tests, as the results below show, making it one of the fastest USB hard disks we've seen.

The Firestorm comes with a backup utility, SyncBack, which supports both scheduled and incremental backups. An encryption utility, TrueCrypt, is also included, and can password-protect your files or even the entire disk. Unfortunately both utilities are tricky to use, and have confusing and poorly organised interfaces.

Although the Firestorm is fast enough for everyday use, at 62p per gigabyte it's not good value. Buffalo's 500GB DriveStation Combo (Labs, Shopper, September 2007) is only £6 more but has three times the capacity and costs a mere 21p per gigabyte. It means the Firestorm is one to avoid unless you can find it cheaper.