Addicted to portable drives

What could you do with a 5GB pocket drive? Obviously, I am not referring to USB Flash drives because — as you probably know — they don’t come in that capacity yet.

I already have a handful of those Flash drives lying around. They’ve become an effective replacement for diskettes — a disappearing medium — but don’t quite fit the bill for me.

Why, you ask? Because their limited capacity — the largest ones I have are 64MB — is in part responsible for spreading my sneakernet data over multiple sticks, which means that I never know which one holds the files I need.

I could find out where exactly the files are by plugging in all the Flash drives, but invariably I end up just grabbing the first drive handy and copying those files again. Not the most efficient way of doing things.

With that in mind, you can understand why I was anticipating the new Pocket Hard Drive from Seagate, which is not built around a memory card but instead contains a real — albeit 1-inch — micro-drive spinning at 3,600rpm and offers a capacious 5GB space for storage.

As you may remember from previous columns, last year Seagate announced a significant expansion of its product line and the intention to enter new markets, including the expectedly lucrative micro-drive area, a segment attractive to both corporate buyers and end-users.

In October, Seagate entered the micro-drive market swinging: Its new unit offers the largest capacity in its class, combined with a pleasant, compact format and a price that puts competing alternatives to shame.

Let’s start with the price. I have seen the Pocket Hard Drive offered on Amazon.com for approximately $160. If this seems expensive, bear in mind that judging from other online offerings, you would pay $100 or more for a Flash drive with only 1GB.

The Seagate drive is hard to dislike. Imagine a perfectly round, sleek cylindrical shell, which is 3/4-inch tall and 3 inches in diameter. In fact, the drive’s shape reminds me of a yo-yo, a similarity reinforced by the 5-inch long USB cable that wraps up neatly and disappears into a groove around that shell. There is no power cord because the unit gets its juice from the computer’s USB (2.0 or earlier) port.

The Pocket Hard Drive’s 5GB provides enough capacity to store all the files I need to carry around, which means the next time I have to sanitize the PC of one of my friends or relatives, I’ll have the needed software, including virus and spyware scanners, all in one place.

The drive has no apparent activity LED, but as soon as I began using it, a central area on the top approximately the size of a quarter began flashing. As I mentioned, there is an actual disk inside spinning at 3,600rpm, and that flashing is a very visible warning that abruptly moving the device could cause data loss.

Judging from the few tests I ran, the drive is sensibly faster than its Flash siblings, although the differences in size and technology make a fair comparison difficult. Nonetheless, the Seagate drive is as easy to use as a Flash drive, and you won’t need to load any driver on recent Mac or Windows computers. Interestingly, Seagate also bundles software to partition the drive into two password-protected areas, something that you may want to implement to preserve sensitive data.

All in all, I have had no grievances with the unit so far. If you are as addicted to portable devices as I am, this 5GB Pocket Hard Drive from Seagate is worth considering.