Philips SPE3091CC 1TB 3.5" External Hard Disk Drive USB2.0 - Electronics / Photography (Philips)

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Customer Reviews of Philips SPE3091CC 1TB 3.5" External Hard Disk Drive USB2.0

John
UK
31st October 2008

Buy 1 today!
Yes! Great value, quality product. Indeed external hard disk enclosures get HOT. To help you to keep things cool, use old resalvaged heat-sinks! I always collect and keep these, all sizes. Mostly alloy but copper is even better. Simply place your drive on a flat lump of alloy, or a heat sink if you have 1. The alloy will suck the heat out of the drive, spread the heat and your drive will get warm and not overheat. Get some heat transfer paste (for cpu) from local computer store, use some between. Never place your drive onto a carpet or soft upholstery, as doing so will have the opposite effect, causing thermal insulation, NOT what we need. Hope this helps friends.

ECGM
In UK
2nd October 2008

Excellent external drive for the price
I have bought this external drive about 2 months back and till now havent had any problems. It works as expected and for the price, I think this is better than few others available in the market. However time will say.
Few things that I feel Philips can improve on this drive are:
1. Noise
2. Heating problem (It heats up to quite a high temperature)
3. Problem while taking it out. Windows sometimes gives a message that Drive is not responding/busy and cannot be stopped at the moment.

Other than these I cannot really think of anything.
I would definitely recommend this drive to everyone.

D. Lock

21st August 2008

Meh....
Cons:

> gets hot
> cannot remove from casing
> loud

Pros:
> cheap(ish)

I should've bought the western digital ones...

darkspark88

21st August 2008

Slow to start up
This drive is brushed aluminium with plastic at either end surrounded by rubber that helps it stay stationary when on a flat surface.

The drive comes pre-formatted with NTFS. Something that is welcome by a windows user that regularly transfers single files larger than 1gb.

In all, the reliaibility cannot be commented on this early on, but the drive does operate quite speedily and file transfers are maybe 5-10 seconds faster than my other external hard drive. Perhaps this is to do with what Philips calls the "prolific chip" for accelerated file transfers. The drive remains quiet throughout operation.

Onto the issues I've found. One, is that the drive takes maybe 15-20 seconds to initialise. My other external hard drive is usable after 5 seconds or so. This may be down to low spin speeds to extend the life of the drive and reduce power consumption, but other than that, the drive sleeps when the computer is put to sleep and wakes when the computer wakes.

Secondly, it gets wildly hot. This may because of the smaller form factor, or a thinner layer of aluminium. Think of when you played who could keep their hand on the radiator for longer...it gets that hot occasionally...

At the moment, for £95 it's certainly good value for money. If the reliability holds up, this is certainly a drive I recommend.

Fayway
London
8th August 2008

Works for me
Works just fine with Vista Ultimate. Very fast but does get hot. Some notes: This runs off mains and is obviously set up for PC users. As the instructions warned, some computers won't boot up with the external drive turned on. So turn it on afterwards. Also, run a disk error checking utilily on your C drive and on the Philips before attempting a Vista Ultimate mirror backup, or you might have problems. Good practice anyway.