... I hear from other places that an external hard drive should have auto-archive capabilities and other features.

That's not what I wanted. I wanted 1TB of hard drive space to keep uncompressed music, and I wanted to be able to attach that hard drive to any of my three PC's.

All it does is connect to your computer via USB, and behaves like any other harddrive. It is not especially fast. It does not have a built in theft lock. It holds 1TB of data.
At this price point, that's all it needs to do. I haven't hit any compatibility issues with XP or Vista (one of my PC's is well over 6 years old!), and it can handle data-heavy processing like ripping a CD directly to it (VERY SLOW).

Bottom line: The USB cable is short, but standard. This is exactly what anybody needs for archiving large piles of data! ...
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