Home > Consumer Reviews > Archos 500332 QDisk External USB 2.0 7200 RPM 60 GB Hard Drive for PC or Mac

I've used the QDisk as a backup drive for my laptop for 9 months now. The drive works great with Windows XP, no driver issues, plug and play. The USB 2 connection is fast. The only problem I have with the drive is that the USB port in the drive broke off. I've been pretty careful with the drive, I occasionally take it back and forth from work - I didn't drop kick it or anything. The port just fell out as I was plugging it in.

This is an excellent hard drive. So far I have had no difficulties at all with it. It installed quickly and easily on my Win2000 Toshiba laptop. Windows recognized it and did all the work of installing the drivers. However, there are two issues i have with this product. First, there is no on/off switch, the only way to turn the hard drive off is to unplug it, otherwise it won't turn off, even if you shut down the computer. Secondly, the ac adaptor is so wide that it takes up 3 slots on my power strip, and while this doesn't affect the function of the drive it is still a pain. Overall though, i'm very happy with this drive.

First of all, I write for BYTE Magazine and WIRED News. I'm a competent computer user and well-versed in dealing with buggy products. It's what I'm paid to do, after all.

I bought the Archos Qdisk for my own backups. What a mistake! I was trying to save money -- instead, I wasted it. The product didn't come with its CD of drivers, instead it had an old floppy disk in the packaging. The floppy failed four times to install the drivers. After the 5th reboot of my computer, it finally figured out how to look for the driver. This, after I called Archos (on my buck! they have no toll free numbers) and they had me download =another= driver, which wasn't even mentioned in the installation materials. That driver crashed my computer 9 times before I finally deleted it and started over with the floppy disk.

When I finally got the driver working (the product is supposed to be plug-and-play!), I found that the disk was shipped =unformatted.= Took another half an hour formatting it. Archos wasn't surprised: apparently half or more of their disks come unformatted from the factory, but they never know which ones.

After formatting it, I tried running Dantz Retrospect for backup. After all, that's what most external hard drives are used for. Retrospect froze so badly I had to reinstall Retrospect from scratch after erasing all traces of the Archos drivers from my computer. I've now unplugged the Archos USB hard drive, and it's sitting on my desktop waiting for me to return it.

This is a piece of trash. It doesn't work even after an entire day's worth of attention is lavished on it. I had other things to do with my time than this -- like, oh, say, backing up my computer on a drive that works?

Don't waste your money on an Archos product; certainly not a Qdisk. There's a reason they're not manufacturing them anymore, I'll warrant.