Freecom Hard Drive 500 GB


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Capacité	500 Go
Interface	USB 2.0
Vitesse de rotation	7200 rpm
Taille du cache	16 Mo
Débit en écriture	--
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Débit en lecture	--
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Pierre-Jean Alzieu
Test date: November 21, 2008

Bundled Software

Freecom supplies two different tools with these hard drives. The first, NTI Ripper, comes as a thirty-day free trial and allows you to encode audio CDs as MP3s with a variety of different settings.

The second, NTI Shadow, is an automatic backup utility. It doesn't take care of your whole backup routine, but it is handy to be able to program the files you want to copy and when you want to copy them.

When it comes to price-per-gigabyte, Freecom's simply named Hard Drive 500 GB is one of the cheapest disks in our survey, along with its near-namesake from LaCie, the Hard Disk 500 GB.

To protect the disk platters, Freecom has opted for a solid aluminum case whose clean lines are easy on the eye.

USB Speeds (MB/s)

On the inside, the drive itself is an excellent Samsung Spin Point model with a 16 MB cache whose 750 GB version we've already tested as an internal hard drive (the HD751LJ).

Despite this promising hardware profile, the Hard Drive 500 GB doesn't beat the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus or even the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition.

The average file transfer rate for both reading and writing on this Freecom is 28.8 MB/s, while Maxtor and Western Digital reach 29.3 MB/s and 29 MB/s respectively.

Stylish metal case

Excellent energy consumption

Seek time of just 14 ms

No FireWire

No eSATA

Physically, Freecom's Hard Drive is one of the biggest in our comparison. A solid metal case looks good, but it's a shame the only way to use it is USB.