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ATMT Scart Drive
Price: £149.99 inc VAT

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 10/03/2007
Featured in magazine:
Issue 153
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: ATMT
Tel: 0870 410 2868
Web Address: www.atmt.co.uk


As our PCs let us become ever more creative and give us more power to download our music and video straight off the net, the struggle for dominance between the computer and the TV becomes ever more intense. So a hard disk that you can use to store all the music, photos and video that your PC accumulates, and lets you hook it up to your TV as well as your computer for when you want to watch and listen from your sofa, is a sensible accessory. Such features used to come at a hefty premium, but this new 320GB disk from ATMT comes with PC and TV connectibility for a more reasonable sounding £150.

Features
The disk has sockets on the back that let you connect to your PC via USB, or to your TV via composite, component or Scart connections. Perhaps the oddest thing is that, despite being called a Scart Drive, it only includes cables for the composite and component options. The remote control for accessing the data on the device once it's unplugged from a computer conveniently clips into the base so you shouldn't lose it. The package also includes a simple software utility to make folders private, which might be handy if you have children and want to keep them away from grown-up content.

Performance
The disk works fine with common music, photo and video standards, but if your media is stored in some of the proprietary data standards around, such as Apple's AAC music format or Microsoft's WMV video format, you'll need to have some way of converting them first. This is far from impossible, but it seems something of a shame that some of the most popular formats aren't supported. The disk itself is handy enough though, with the USB 2.0 connection proving fast enough to get most files from your computer in a short time.

Ease of use
The device is very easy to use. Connection to your PC is via a USB cable and, once it's plugged in, it simply appears as another disk in your My Computer folder. Unlike some rival products you don't have to put different media types in preconfigured folders – this will just find your media and play it. This leaves the organisation of the disk to you, which is fine for most reasonably tidy people. The downside is that the interface you use to control the disk while it's attached to your TV is very simple, so it's incapable of more sophisticated functions such playing music while displaying a slideshow of photos.

Value for money
Although the TV features add to the cost of the disk, making it more expensive than a standard external hard disk of the same capacity, the premium added on for those features isn't as stiff as many of its rivals. This may be partly to do with its reduced complexity, especially with respect to the software that comes with the device, but it's perfectly functional and we haven't exactly been bowled over by the more sophisticated products on the market. This makes for good value for money, as long as you're expecting a practical, effective solution rather than something overly slick.

More Audio Equipment reviews:

• Sansa View 16GB
• D-Link DSM-330 DIVX HD Media Player
• Buffalo LinkTheater Wireless
• ATMT Scart Drive
• Netgear Digital Entertainer EVA700