I'd love to tell you how good this is. Love to. And, until around 9am this morning, it was the second best external hard drive I have ever had. It's in a smooth, rubberised case, which manages to protect it - though you wouldn't exactly drop it regularly - is small, quiet, and about the size of a 400 page paperback book (Remember them? Without them, there wouldn't be an Amazon, at all).

However, come 9am this morning, I plugged the machine to continue backing up my other external hard drives. Data doesn't exist unless it is in two places. Or three. Here we go. So in I plugged it : with 1.31TB already copied of my 1.71TB, I've spent most of the past four days with this machine plugged in and copying material over. What is also baffling is whilst you can use this for PC and Mac, the PC software is miniscule, and not included on the drive. You need to download the PC drivers as it is primarily designed for Mac usage : which seems bizarre that both sets of drivers were not included in this otherwise strong device.

And what would you NOT want to see on a hard drive? "The drive needs to be formatted?" "Hard Disk error : this disk is corrupted and unreadable"? Exactly. And after just four days. Well. Thanks a cottonpicking bundle! What seemed to be a great drive was a useless hunk of plastic. I checked with various utilities, and whilst the drive was still readable, the partition and identifying data was corrupt. So, a perfectly usable 2TB disk, chock full of data that is irrecoverable without specialist tech advice or hours tinkering with it. This is not what you want from a drive on day 4 of operation.

I formatted the disk. And now, I am labourously copying back over 1.71TB of information. All thanks to an unstable base and corrupt partition when connecting. Up to that point, this was a solid, quick device. Of course, there is a detailed PDF manual on the drive. Well, there WAS, until the drive committed baffling electronic suicide. And thus, I am magnificently unimpressed with this machine - if there were a boot CD with a clone of the information on, and a proper hard manual, and the PC software was included, and I hadn't needed to wipe and rebuild on day four of usage, I would be a LOT happier.