I hadn’t always seen the point of external hard drives, but then I stumbled upon about 3TB of stuff that I wanted (in a mystery location) and went out and bought this.

It’s 2TB – ‘2000GB’ – although really that means (2,000,396,288,000 bytes, or 1810GB thanks to kilo/kibi debacle. Still, that’s more storage than all my other drives put together, so it would be rude to complain.

Though it is external, it’s not ‘portable’ – i.e. you can’t move it when it’s on like a laptop. It has a USB2 cable and a power adapter which sucks 12V DC (twice as much as the USB port outputs (5V), but you could in theory run it straight out of your computer like this).

USB2 is plenty fast enough to watch DVD quality movies on the go (480MB/s) – haven’t tried anything better than that but at this stage can’t see why I’d need to.

Using it as a media server on your network is possible – but make sure your router is up to is – my wireless router isn’t quite there.

• When you get any external HDD drive, make sure it’s formatted in NTFS, not FAT32 format
  FAT32 doesn’t let you copy single files over 4GB (e.g. movies).
• If you’re getting one, try here.