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POCKET DRIVE
The Pocket Drive is based around a tiny 1" Microdrive with 6 GB of capacity.
With an average price of around ~US$15 per gigabyte, its asset is its size,
not its capacity or performance. Like its larger cousin, the physical case is
much larger than the drive itself.
In appearance, the Pocket Drive resembles a miniature UFO (much like the power
brick for a generation of Apple PowerBooks). The circular design serves a functional
as well as an aesthetic purpose: The outer ring (silver) slides around the inner
core to wrap and unwrap the cable.
Unfortunately, the cable is barely six inches long, which meant that the drive
often dangled from the cable when it was plugged in. This may have been by design
— the drive didn't appear to suffer from any ill effects while hanging
— but the long term stress on the USB port could be an issue.
The translucent center "button" lights up in blue whenever the drive
seeks, and, like the 2.5" drive, seems unnecessarily bright.
Wind and unwind: Cable management is a piece of cake.
Lots of approvals from two/three/four letter agencies.
Software
"Pocket Drive Toolkit" comes pre-loaded on the Pocket Drive. When
run, the software installs itself on the host machine and sets itself to start
whenever the computer is booted, asking for internet access if a firewall is
in place. The software does not show up in the Add/Remove Programs list, but
a menu option, accessible from the taskbar, allows the software to be uninstalled.
Without the software, the Pocket Drive functions like any other removable storage,
but there are several features that are accessible only through the utility:
- Create Boot Disc (formats the drive with FreeDos installed)
- Manage Partition (allows free adjustment of public / encrypted partitions)
- Restore Factory Default (formats the drive and reinstalls all of the default
utilities)
- Log in to Encrypted Partition & Change Password
- Write Protect Drive
This utility comes pre-loaded on the drive.
Use the Toolkit utility to log in to the encrypted partition.
The encryption feature of the Pocket Drive is worthy of note because the encryption
is done by the drive itself, not the operating system. In fact, unless the user
is logged in, the encrypted partition is completely invisible to Windows' partition
manager. By the same token, when the user is logged in, the unencrypted
portion of the drive disappears, making it impossible to transfer data between
the encrypted and unencrypted partitions without using temporary storage while
the user logs in or out.
The encrypted ("Secure") and unencrypted ("Public") partitions
can be resized at will.
Seagate Pocket Hard Drive (quoted from Seagate's
datasheet)
|
| FEATURE & BRIEF |
COMMENT |
| Never worry about
your data. This extremely durable pocket drive is designed with unique
shock absorbers. |
Perhaps this
is why the casing is so much bigger than the actual drive. |
| Built-in, retractable
USB 2.0 cable is always available when you need it, protected in the
sleek, round shell when you don’t. |
All-in-one
integration; no extra cable to carry around. |
| Just plug this
drive into your computer’s USB 2.0 port and go. You don’t need
a power supply. |
Another important
one for portability. |
| Hot-swappable,
so you can connect and disconnect without turning off your computer. |
This should
be expected. |
| 3600-RPM
drive with 2-Mbyte cache consistently delivers the high performance
you need. |
How long
has it been since someone has called a 3,600 RPM drive "high performance"?
10 years? 20? |
| Works with
your PC and Mac. |
Ok. |
One potential use of the Pocket Drive is as a permanent boot image that is
hardware independent. Several self-configuring versions of Linux might be suitable. A few of them even boot without requiring write access
to the system drive. Combined with the write protect feature, this makes possible
an emergency boot disc that is unlikely to become infected with any net nasties.
With write protect disabled, it could be a good tool for emergency file recovery.
Of course, all such roles can already filled by bootable CD and DVD images, but
the Pocket Drive has one advantage: A USB interface that does not require an
optical drive to run.
| Help support this site, buy the Seagate 6GB Pocket Drive from one of our affiliate retailers! |
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