Home > Consumer Reviews > Archos 40GB Mini Hard Disk Drive with USB 2.0

This is a nice, very portable drive and works well if your computer has USB 2.0 as standard (forget USB 1.1 since it's far too slow for this size of drive).
I had major setup problems however since my laptop supports USB 1.1 only. Anticipating this problem I purchased a cardbus card with two USB 2.0 ports. Connecting the Archos drive to this card presented two problems.
1) The drive cannot derive enough power through the cardbus card to work without an external power supply. This reduces the portability of the drive.
2) Driver installation is then not "plug and play". The built-in Windows XP drivers do not configure the drive properly and it does not appear in "My Computer". The automatically installed drivers for the Archos drive and the cardbus adapter must be replaced by those on the Archos installation disk.

Conclusion: I did finally get my Archos drive to work but be warned that if you have the same hardware setup as me then you may spend considerable time fiddling with the drivers.

Plugged HD into various PC's USB2 ports. All of them used some version of either Windows 2000 or XP and I did not experience any difficulties.

However, beware of pluging it into the USB port of laptops (e.g. D600 from Dell) as the USB standard spec does not supply enough power. You need the external power supply or a powered USB hub. Quite disappointing to have this nice portal drive and needing the extra power...

Excellent buy.
I was looking for a way of transferring and storing lots of information without having to use lots of CD rom discs
I can also take this hard drive on business leaving my laptop behind and just plugging it into another computer when I get there, with access to all my data on one small portable drive!
So easy to install, in fact my home computer recognised it and installed it by itself!
This drive really is so small and portable and I was amazed at how quickly it works using a USB 2 connection, with an incredible rate of transfer of files
It is a definite best buy rating in my opinion

I bought this hard disk to have a removable, portable backup of all my business projects, databases, office documents and email, as well as personal data such as music files, digital pictures and videos. I wanted something that would be easy to slip into a pocket or bag, and it is exactly that. It measures 11.5cm by 7cm with just a depth of about 1.5cm and certainly feels solid enough.

I installed it on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server machine with USB 1.1, without any problems. As soon as I plugged the USB cable in, it showed up immediately as a local disk in My Computer folder.

Yes, it is a little slow on USB 1.1, but for smaller files it's fine - and a slow backup is better than no backup! The product doesn't ship with any software, so I downloaded a trial version of Handy Backup 4.0 (www.handybackup.com), which allows you to do a full or differential backup, scheduled backups, compression and also allows password protection - essential in case you lose this little piece of hardware. If you use this with USB 1.1, you can set a full backup to run, and then run regular differential backups to save time.

It's small, light, travels well and I would recommend it to anyone who has a PC with any sort of valuable data on it. Great for both business and personal use.