Home > Consumer Reviews > Archos Arcdisk 1.8 external 20GB Hard Disk Drive with USB2.0 cable

I have only had this a couple of days, but so far I have loaded it onto:

a pentium 120 (very old) running Windows 98 (not Win98SE),
a 133 laptop (win98),
a pentium 3 1.2 pc (win98)
a new pentium 4 2.8 laptop running winXPhome

and it has not raised a single problem with any of them - no problems loading it and no problems transfering files. My first data transfer was 3GB in size and between 3 pcs and it seems to be flawless.

It is obviously much slower on the win98 because the usb ports are version 1, but it works at a good pace on the XP laptop as that has v2 usb.

I have had no problems so far with running the Archos from just USB power with the exception of the very elderly and tiny laptop (toshiba libretto) - but as I have to run it via a port adaptor because as the laptop is so old it does not have built in USB - so it does seem nit-picky to complain, because of course the adaptor is an additional drain to the power supplied to the Archos. Plug the Archos in the mains electricity and its sorted.

The Archos ran fine on the XP laptop with neither connected to the mains electricity.

Very happy so far.

The concept is very attractive to any one constantly on the road or anyone wishing to be able to work on a huge number of files and also quickly transfer them between two or more workstations. Given the price though, Archos ought to have emphasized how important the external power supply is to a reliable operation of this HD so potential customers know the limits of its portability.

It operates flakily without the power supply hooked up, often disrupting file transfers with a variety of I/O errors. At least, that's my experience under Win-XP where you have to rely on the operating system-supplied mass storage device drivers. These drivers provide little or no options for optimization so I feel Archos should provide dedicated optimized drivers for this particular OS.

Does everything it says on the tin. One star removed for flaky Win-XP performance (incessant I/O errors), probably attributable to having to rely on an OS driver. Works great under Win-98 for which a manufacturer's driver disk is supplied.

Drive worked well for the first 6 to 8 months before developing a fault between the disk and the USB cable connection. Sent the drive away whilst under warranty and although it worked for a couple of months afterwards, the connection soon became loose again and eventually failed, and is now effectively dead / redundant. Have replaced it with a small external Plextor drive which, so far, seems more reliable (6 months in).