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It looks like a hockey puck, has a four inch tail, and is able to store 13 hours of digital video. It isn?t the latest portable media player, but rather the latest pocket hard drive from Seagate with an impressive 5GB of storage.
At first the small, unassuming device looks more like a toy than a large repository of information you can take with you on a moments notice. Many consumers are already using Jump Drives or Thumb Drives to take their documents, media, and music on the road to their next computer destination, but at the moment only top out at around 2GB in size. The Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive is small enough to fit in your pocket but has more than enough space for important documents, business presentations, or even a large multimedia file you want to show your friends just for fun.
Because the Seagate drive is a USB (1.1 or later) device, all of the power comes from the computer you are plugging into. As long as you have a USB port (and what computer doesn?t these days), you can use this hard drive on a variety of computers from laptops to desktops at numerous locations ranging from an Internet Café, to home, to the boardroom. While most recent computers will have Windows XP installed, the Seagate drive will work on OSs all the way back to Windows 98SE.
The puck shape design of the Seagate drive is well done, the inner wheel rotates to hide the USB cable when it is not in use, and you may find yourself playing with the wheel in your spare thinking moments. There are no sharp edges or clips that will snag on your clothes or get caught up in your bag or purse when you are reaching for it.
The drive is fast, but not what I would call blindingly fast. The drive spins at 3600RPM and has a 2MB cache making it fast enough to watch a 75 minute, 350MB QuickTime movie without any drops, pauses or glitches, but transferring larges amounts of files quickly can be limiting on a USB 1.1 port. In my test it took roughly 5 minutes to transfer 400MB of files and image to the drive. For someone backing up their system completely the wait might be tolerable, but for the industrial spy, this long wait could spell the difference between making money or getting caught. For the USB 2.0 enabled, the Seagate drive has a data transfer rate of 480 Mbps. Because of the drive speed, this is not a device you could digitize high quality video onto, but it could be used to transport video from one station to the next.
Speaking of sabotage or theft of information on the drive, the Windows user can password protect the data with Seagate?s Secure Zone feature. This is very useful for those working with or transferring sensitive data, but the password protection is not available for the Mac.
The drive works right out of the box for modern systems, but a CD with additional drivers is included for older operating systems.
The good news is the drive is readily available from most retail outlets for a MSRP of $200, although sales have seen the drive for around $170.
If you need more storage than a typical thumb drive, you will find the solution with the Seagate 5GB USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive. Fast enough for every day work and more than enough storage for business, graphic design, animation, and web development needs, I give the Seagate drive a Good Buy Recommendation.
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