Buy.com - Fantom GreenDrive 1 TB - Hard Drive

Customer Reviews

Value	4.9
Performance	4.8
Ease of Use	4.9
Overall Satisfaction	4.8

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5 of 5 Great HD 8/13/2010
CRT from Warren, MI

Gave this to my wife for a Christmas gift and now there is nothing but smiles, lots of photos stored and lots of room, along with a great price I would say Great Deal!

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Works great 4/13/2010
from Phoenix, AZ

This is the second one I've bought. I've had my other one since October of 2008. The other one was getting use at home and at the office both, and I finally convinced the office accountant this was a good buy for the office. I've been carrying it back and forth between home and office for months in a shopping bag and haven't trashed it yet, despite a few drops. I would recommend keeping it in a padded case if you're going to do this, like a handgun case, or at least use the padded box it comes in. Pros: I've only used the USB cable and not the eSATA, but the backup is fast, the case does not get hot, and I haven't managed to break it yet. I am considering discarding the stand -- nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't need it. There is no fan, so the only way you can tell it's on and running is the green light in front that flickers when the drive spins. Cons: Not actually 1TB; it is 931GB. First drive in 2008 was FAT32 and had to reformat, current ones appear to be NTFS. My latest drive came formatted for NTFS with a note saying they no longer formatted them in FAT32.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

4 of 5 Good value for money 4/8/2010
Dee from Edison, NJ

It is quite small, light, quiet and cool. It works without any problems with WinXP, Vista & Ubuntu - just plug-n-play as its supposed to. Available size is a bit less but that is to be expected of all drives so its nothing to be concerned about. The base stand provided with this drive is not very useful and the drive can be used without it as well. I received the rebate without any problems. Overall, a good value for money and definitely recommended.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

4.7 of 5 Good Drive. Useless Rebate 3/22/2010
RobLiv from Seattle, WA

The drive works well as advertised, but keep in mind you'll be paying the pre-rebate price. I did EVERYTHING requested for their $20 rebate and never heard a peep from them. If you make it your full time job to get the rebate back, you have a shot. Otherwise, just pay the pre-rebate price and get on with the rest of your life.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Bought for more DVR memory 1/24/2010
Darthur35 from Nixa, MO

I bought this drive to attach to my DVR, which only holds about 60GB internally. Now it holds up to 1.6GB! (Your DVR must have an eSATA port to work). I've had no problems with the drive and we're actually recording more programs than we can watch. It's the end of January and we still have a couple movies we recorded back in August 2008! I'd like to get another one for my computer, but I already have 1.35GB of drive space there, so It would be kind of redundant. Anyway, it's one of the best external hard drives I've ever had (been through 3 Western Digital "My Book" drives - they all crashed). Plus this drive is green and doesn't get hot or have a fan to make noise. I would highly recommend it!

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6 of 7 customers found this review helpful.

1 of 5 FAILED TO WORK AND NO REBATE FROM PROMO PROCESS 3 11/28/2009
John Junker from White Plains NY

YOU WILL NOT GET THE REBATE FROM PROMO PROCESS SO ADD $20 (or more depending on current "promissed rebate amount"). THEY WILL ASK FOR NUMBERS YOU WILL MOST LIKELY NO LONGER HAVE TO "LOOK INTO" THE STATUS OF YOUR REBATE. VERY POOR AND COMBERSOME PROSESS WHICH IN THE END LEAVES YOU HIGH AND DRY. DONT BUY THIS EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

3 of 5 Drives should not crash your system.... 10/29/2009
Dale from Houston, TX

I've got the drive USB connected to my brand new HP A6720Y, running Windows 7. The drive appears to be the source of a problem I'm having with the system. 1) EVERY time I try to sync my iPhone (music and pics on the Fantom drive) my system crashes. When I moved the pics to my internal hard drive and re-sync'd - it works - EVERY time. 2) sometimes when I'm not really doing much of anything (listening to music with media player) the system crashes - my page file is on this external drive, but I think I'll move it back to internal to see if this resolves this issue as well. Lastly the system crashes at times when it's completely idle. This is because my screen saver is showing pictures from the Fantom drive. When I boot the system and leave the Fantom turned off - the system runs flawlessly for days. The drive works most of the time and it's a lot of storage for not much money, but system stability may be the real price you pay.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Great Value 10/28/2009
Shaun from South Ogden, UT

Works great with Vista and Windows 7. However, do NOT use the included NTI backup software with Windows 7. It installs a device driver that does not like Windows 7.

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12 of 12 customers found this review helpful.

1 of 5 Warranty is NO GOOD 10/28/2009
LarryD from Phoenix, AZ

My drive died a month from it's 1 year anniversary on my receipt. I emailed customer service, they stalled by saying they sold it to buy.com at an earlier date and asked for my receipt (which was already included in the first email) I sent my response addressing my purchase date from buy.com and a copy of the receipt again, they have never responded, making the warranty no good. Having worked in warranty call centers, this is a standard stall procedure by companies that want only the money, not for you to have satisfaction or actually use the warranty.

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5 of 5 Great for a backup drive 10/27/2009
from Monrovia, Maryland

Works great. I reformatted the drive, but that is not necessary. Reformatting does take a while because it is a large disk drive.

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4.3 of 5 Good but energy saver slows things down 10/23/2009
Ray Sanford from Newark, DE

Overall fine for MY uses - mainly full backups of my 4 computers BUT many users will be turned off by the energy saving features - which does save electricity but slows copy/backup start by quite a lot. I have both types of connections on 2 of my computers - naturally you need to disconnect one to use the other connection, really not sure there is any significant difference between speeds.

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5 of 5 Never gets hot 10/11/2009
Jessica from Oakland, NJ

I have had this drive since May and have never once had a problem. I simply plugged it into my iMac 24" and everything just worked. And the best part, it NEVER gets hot or even remotely warm. Makes less noise than my iMac when it's backing up. Absolutely love it!

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5 of 5 So far so good. 9/30/2009
from Minneapolis

I got this drive about two weeks ago. So far, it's performed as advertised. It remains quiet and cool during operation, and works well with both Vista and XP operating systems (two different computers)using the USB connection. I'm also pleased with the eSATA and on/off switch features. The only point I would alert people to is that reformatting to NTFS takes much longer -- hours longer -- than suggested in the manual; that said, the process itself is very straight-forward. Great value!

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5 of 5 eSATA huh? 9/23/2009
Kashman from Milwaukee, WI

The drive works great for what i paid for it. Large capacity and very silent. Once in a while I hear it spinning when I do my heavy backups. The eSATA option is not available on my computer so I have no use for it. I use it via USB and data transfer is relatively fast

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Works Great 9/17/2009
Paul from Hibbing, MN

I bought this drive 8 months ago for storeage of digital videos from a new camcorder and file backup. It installed easy and works great. I only backup about once a month, so I can't attest to the long term use, but it works great for my use.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 GD1000EU 8/19/2009
David from Wisconsin

Everything works great so far. Easy installation and copying of files. Especially a good buy since the price has dropped since I bought mine.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

4.7 of 5 Great Drive For The Price - And On TimeCapsule 7/21/2009
Tom in Tulsa from Tulsa, OK

I bought this drive to connect to my Apple TiimeCapsule for backups. I'm using the 500GB internal drive for a NAS and the 1TB external for the TimeMachine drive. It was easy to setup (good instructions) for the Mac and works very good on the TimeCapsule device. The only "ding" I would have is that you can hear it working. When it is being written to you hear the "clicking" of the drive head. Not real loud but noticeable in a small area. I'm going to move it into a hardware tech cabinet that is nearby to stifle this. Bought it "standard free shipping" but BUY.COM got it to me much quicker than the stated timeframe - like they almost always do. Recommended.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Excellent Drive 7/17/2009
Darin from Gainesville, FL

The drive works fine. eSATA is a nice touch that I use because I don't actually transport the drives except on rare occasions. Bought one, filled it up, bought another 2 months later, filled it up. Been about 4 months now and think I need to buy another. They are quiet, efficient, and have a simple but classy design. They don't include an eSATA cable because, well, ITS 100 DOLLARS. It comes formatted in FAT32 BECAUSE IT'S A UNIVERSAL FORMAT. They use a power adapter because it's a multi-platter hi-power drive. If it didn't use a power adapter, you'd be spending 2 or 3 hundred extra dollars. The light is bright because it's a light. Seriously, cover it, point it in another direction, do something. You know this is a good drive at a great price because the above comments answer every complaint people have made on this site.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 The best External Drive I've had 7/13/2009
from Fort Lauderdale, Fl

I own a recording studio and i've used the expensive Glyphs, Lacies and also WD. By far I am impressed with the speed and quality of this drive. What's also a big plus for me is the quiteness of the drive and it doesn't get too hot which helps in a studio atmosphere. I've had issues with other hard drives but I've had this one for months and not a single problem. I'm going to buy a couple more once the price goes down some.

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0 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Works Great and Less Filling... 6/24/2009
from H.B. CA

Quiet...smooth and fast performance. Power intuitive. Cheers fantom for going green!

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Easy to Use and Definitely Worth the Money 6/23/2009
Arlene from Bronx, NY

I have had the Fantom GreenDrive 1TB USB 2.0 and eSATA External Hard Drive (GD1000EU) now for about 6 months and love how easy it is to backup my documents, photos, music - you name it! The ease and security that you experience is well worth the money.

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4 of 5 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 You can't go wrong with this External HDD 6/16/2009
from Indianapolis, IN

I usually spend a lot of time researching before I buy anything. (It's my hobby in a way). I've been planning to buy an External HDD for about a month now. I finally decided on this one because of it's Quality and Value. And of course waited long enough so that the price would drop below $100. :-) This is a great product. I'd have given it a 6/5 if only .. 1. They could format it with NTFS Sys. FAT32 is so stone age. Not a big deal because you just need to spend about 40 minutes to format it on your own. 2. As many other reviewers have pointed out ... they gotta include an eSATA cable along with it. 3. How about making it adapter free. Power supply could be via USB or eSATA cable. Those are just my pet peeves. Over all this is a great product and I love it.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

4.7 of 5 Great high-capacity drive 6/14/2009
Becky from East Lansing, MI

I am pretty much computer illiterate, but this drive was incredibly easy to use. The formatting into NTFS (whatever that means) took forever, but after that the backup of my hard drive was smooth sailing. I like that it's extremely quiet as well. Great hard drive if you're looking to buy your first one.

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3 of 3 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Back up for my back up.... 5/22/2009
TrinaD from West Jordan, UT

I bought this product to have as back up to my other external hard drive and my computer. I am scanning in years and years of pictures and needed something reliable to have as a back-up. So far, so good. Easy to use and works exactly like my other hard drive. Price was right...and free shipping which was very fast. Didn't cut corners on shipping to make it free.

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2 of 3 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 FANTOMastic!! 5/19/2009
FANTOMized from San Francisco, CA

Best quality, Best price, Very small footprint. Best Drive Hands down! Most times, It doesn't sound like its even on, super QUIET! Real Plug & Play on my MAC.

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4.7 of 5 GREAT+easy to use 5/18/2009
Erich from Chicago, IL

Had to format it for PC, took over a half hour, but is flawless and simple to use. Great product and great price! Perfect!

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2 of 6 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Worth it so far. 5/18/2009
from Lacey, WA

Does what it is supposed to do. One beef I have with "advertised" 1TB hard drives is that they are no where near a full 1TB. This one shows 937GB when attached. Still lots of storage, but let's get real.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

4.3 of 5 Great Capacity 5/18/2009
Steve A from Batavia, IL

Good price $99 after rebate. Pretty simple to use once formatted, just plug it in and your computer will see it as an external drive.

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2 of 4 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 NICE, EASY, MORE THAN I EXPECTED 5/17/2009
from Fort Lauderdale, FL

Sure i read all these reviews before i decided to purchase this drive but i was still skeptic. To my suprise it was everything that was described in these reviews. it is whisper quiet and doesn't get hot and it was easy to use. just plug and play. i bought it to plug it into my ps3 so it was a treat that it came formatted in fat32. just wished it came with 1tb instead of 930 something gigs. great drive for the price. i used the ebillme option that had a $25 rebate to it and i recieved $20 off this soooo it was a bargain! search the internet for further discount codes!

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Very good external HDD 5/12/2009
from New york

It is very quiet and cool. With a good adapter just 12v, not like the other bulky adapter. Perfect size. Recommend to all

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5 of 5 great for home network 5/11/2009
Tom Leeds from Chicago

I've gotten a second and am considering a third to attach to my airport hub. When they are not being accessed they are zero noise and zero heat so I don't mind that they are turned on 24/7 since I'm sure they are using almost no electrical and getting no ware. After they are initially accessed and spin up there is very little difference than drives hooked up directly to my Mac.

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5 of 5 Great addition to PC 5/7/2009
Chicho from Salem, oregon

Quiet ,cool running, never hot. What more could you ask for, this is a great HD. Recommended to anyone looking for more memory space.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

4.7 of 5 Great Price. A Little Noisy! 5/6/2009
HMera from Houston, Texas

A great buy for the money! Works great on my iMac computer. Mac users must reformat it to use the entire hard drive. Use Disk Utility software that comes with every Mac. Select the format "Mac OS Extended (journaled)." Easy setup instructions come with the hard drive. The drive was a little louder than my other hard drives. I have used Acomdata, Lacie, & FreeAgent. Sounds a little tinny, but, not objectionable. Highly Recommended.

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5 of 5 Does what it's suppose to. 5/6/2009
from Somewhere in Orange County, CA

This HD does exactly what its suppose to. Runs great! Not hot.Tons of room, little bummed that its actually less than a TB but thats usually the case with most of these HD's. I would recommend this to others. Still waiting for rebate. I guess you will not be able to find out about that until a much later time, otherwise this review wouldnt come in till, well you know.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 very impressed 5/5/2009
Dillon from Dallas, TX

I'm very impressed with this drive. Although I have only used the USB portion of it, the drive seems to be built very well. I think what I am most impressed about is that it doesn't get HOT. Some of my previous external drives just get smoking hot. This one I honestly feel like i could leave it on 24hrs a day and not worry about it getting too hot.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 so far so good 5/4/2009
P from Houston, TX

so far this HDD is working great. i have a 250 GB fantom external hard drive that is still up and running for the past 6 years now, and i also had a western digital external HDD which was 500 gb which died and on me right after the 12th month, so i could not send it in for warranty repair, and all my information could not be salvaged. good job FANTOM!!!!!

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5 of 5 Great Product, more than satified. 5/4/2009
Jerry from Parlin, NJ

Great product, very fast, even using USB. Hard to format for NTFS but went very well and simple. Great shipping as well. I love the drive.

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5 of 5 Fantom Green Drive - Excellent buy 5/3/2009
ginofs from Armonk, NY

I responded to the offer of a Fantom 1 TB GreenDrive for a very decent price. What I got was more than I expected - a fast, quiet, cool-running drive with fantastic eSata performance with my new laptop. Speaking of cool - after hours of running, the drive is seemingly at room temperature, and its power adapter is similarly cool. This is looking like a very good deal for me.

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4.3 of 5 Great backup for a good price 5/1/2009
Kevin from Peru IN

Nice backup drive comes formatted in FAT32 which is not my preferred format so I reformatted to NTSF also doesn't come with the ESATA cable which would be handy over all i would recommend this drive.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 plug & play 4/25/2009
from KC, MO

Easy! Formated to NTFS and works GREAT!

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4 of 4 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Works well with Dish VIP 722 4/22/2009
from Salem, OR

I have a DishNetwork HD DVR, which can record about 60 hours of HD or hundreds of hours of SD (or any combination). It also has the option to hook up an external USB drive, although support is limited to "single" drives -- if the external is really a RAID array of two physical drives, it won't work. That's why they recommend sticking with smaller drives. This one, however, works wonderfully. It runs cool and quiet, and is fairly responsive. I've filled less than half of the drive, even though I've copied about 50 HD movies off the premium channels onto it. If you're watching a show from this drive, you can only fast forward at about 60x -- you can't go up to the 300x that's normally possible, probably due to limitations in USB 2.0 bandwidth. For HD content, it takes about 1/4 of the duration of the show to copy it to the drive -- so a two-hour movie could take half an hour to copy (this can vary dramatically as compression affects size, which affects copy speed). The only drawbacks would belong in a review of the Dish hardware rather than here, and they're all minor (shows on the external drive appear on a separate menu you can access from the normal DVR menu, durations don't appear on the list of shows but do appear on the details for each individual show). The drive itself performs wonderfully, and after two months I have 0 complaints.

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2 of 2 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 WOW is eSata faster than USB2 4/18/2009
ginofs from Armonk, NY

I got my Fantom 1 TB Green Drive recently and agree with others that it is COOL-RUNNING and QUIET. You CAN hear it when it is actively doing backups, but it's lots quieter than my previous drives. Again, even after hours of running, it is still cool. Even the power adapter is cool! This drive is obviously consuming less power. I ran a test comparing the backup speed of USB2 to eSata. I found the Green Drive eSata connection was about 4 to 5 times faster backing up than USB2. I clocked a 20 GB backup at about 23 MB/Sec with eSata vs 5 MB/Sec with USB2. Your mileage may vary. This is a great drive for the money - thanks, Buy.com!

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5 of 5 Works Great in my Series 3 Tivo 4/18/2009
from Lehi, UT

Plugged it into the ESATA port and tivo saw it. Then I told it to format it and boom, I have more room than I know what to do with. I never plugged it into my computer, so I can not say how fast it is. All I know is the Tivo if fine with it and it is really quiet.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

5 of 5 Great ESATA DVR expander 4/13/2009
from Pittsburgh, PA

Got this to expand the internal 160GB HD of our Pace Tahoe TDC775HD PVR with Armstrong Cable (Butler, PA). Followed the simple directions and it was up and working in a matter of minutes. Did need to purchase a separate ESATA cable. PVR went from 100% full to 20% full. Been working fine for about a month. Gives MUCH more room to store HD content, still haven't managed to get past about 50% full. Usually leave on all the time, never more than a little warm to the touch.

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1 of 1 customers found this review helpful.

4.7 of 5 Excellent Price and Size 4/12/2009
from Chico, CA

This drive is sold at a very reasonable price. The size and noise of the drive is small making this a excellent choice for anyone. I haven't had these drives long enough to make an accurate statement for reliability but they do not have any bad reviews about failing.

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4.3 of 5 Excellent eSATA DVR drive 4/10/2009
from Detroit, MI

Had to reformat to NTFS which took a long time. Had to purchase the eSATA cable, but purchased it thru monoprice.com which was much cheaper than Best Buy or other retail outlet. Use it for a Direct TV DVR drive thru the eSATA connection. Works fine so far (two weeks). Would have liked for it to turn off automatically when the DVR was turned off.

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4.7 of 5 Wow - great product 4/10/2009
David Orlando from East Stroudsburg, PA

It is as simple as plug and play... with one exception. You need to reformat the drive to NTFS. I believe the drive should come NTFS formatted already. Other than that... 1TB for a hundred bucks... can't beat it.

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5 of 5 An excellent and cheap storage 4/9/2009
Laks from Princeton, NJ

The much-anticipated drive arrived, was a breeze to setup and get files copied to it. I could decommission two other 200GB drives that were getting old and maybe put to some other use. But with 1TB, I cannot think of what I would use the 200GB drives for. Now, all my music, pictures and videos are backed up on this drive safe-and-sound. Might buy another once the price comes back down.

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4.7 of 5 Good product 4/8/2009
from Augusta, GA

Since the hard drive is plug and play, it is very easy to use. Plenty of space to store image of my hard drives.

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5 of 5 Great value, quiet, and fast 4/7/2009
Jan from Birmingham, AL

The drive is easy to use, performs as fast as most hard drives, and it is so quiet you would not know it is on unless you see the drive's light illuminated. Also, 1 TB is large enough to store all the data you want for a long time to come. I like it so much I later bought another one for a family member. I had both orders shipped standard rate and received them in less than five days.

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Fantom GreenDrive 1 TB - Hard Drive - Retail - GD1000EU rnal Hard Drive - 2 Year Warranty!

Fantom GreenDrive 1 TB - Hard Drive - Retail - GD1000EU
rnal Hard Drive - 2 Year Warranty!