2 comments

Future Shops 13 Days of Web Deals, Day 2: 500GB External Hard Drive

Posted by & filed under Canadian Deals & Coupons.

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As a bit of a down­load junkie, and item like this sets my heart aflut­ter. Not only is this a great price on a 500GB Exter­nal Hard Drive, but it’s the first web deal I’ve seen to be avail­able both in store and online. But not all is good in Comstar-town.

When search­ing for a review of the prod­uct, noth­ing came up. That’s not exactly the mark of a qual­ity brand name. As a a mat­ter of fact, the only infor­ma­tion I could find came from our very own Boo when he posted the November’s 6 Days of Web Deals and this item just hap­pened to show up;

Com­star man­u­fac­tures mediocre prod­ucts and when it comes to a sen­si­tive items like exter­nal hard dri­ves I’d rather spend a few more bucks and buy a higher qual­ity prod­uct. If how­ever you’re look­ing for the low­est price you could spend on a 500GB exter­nal hard drive then this is def­i­nitely the right deal for you.

There you have it folks — it’s not good, but it’s cheap. And at that time, Boo was writ­ing about a price of $229 — so it’s dropped even further.

If you’re inter­ested, you can pick up this deal here.

2 Responses to “Future Shops 13 Days of Web Deals, Day 2: 500GB External Hard Drive”

  1. K. Sadler

    I bought the same device on the same Future Shop web­site pro­mo­tion and just received it yesterday.

    Pros:
    – The price was great, espe­cially when com­pared with other backup units from FS and else­where.
    – It’s an all-in-one com­plete pack­age, includ­ing the unit, power cord, data cable, stand, and soft­ware CD.
    – Nice quiet oper­a­tion, and the case does not seem to get too warm.
    –The 1-button backup fea­ture is great if you just want to per­form a backup on demand.
    – The clamshell pack­ag­ing keeps the unit pro­tected well before sale.
    – The unit claims Vista compatibility.

    Cons:
    – The item was out of stock for 3 weeks.
    – If you fol­low their instruc­tions regard­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion, it may not work and just lock up. The ven­dor rec­om­mended con­fig­ur­ing the unit to Opti­mize For Per­for­mance, but that only resulted in the unit lock­ing up after about 5 min­utes.
    – The unit does not have a cool­ing fan with the case, like sev­eral other mod­els do to keep the HD cool.
    – The 1-Button backup soft­ware is rather prim­i­tive and lim­ited.
    – You do not get the option to pro­duce a com­pressed backup file, rather than just copy­ing the entire source disk to a des­ti­na­tion direc­tory.
    – The drive comes for­mat­ted as FAT 32, but most users will want to upgrade to NTFS and the instruc­tions do not cover that.
    – No sup­port web­site was found (just a 800 phone num­ber was included).

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