That Pocket Hard Drive looks like it could be used for booting up a small file server, perfect!

This is also one of the products which I have seen that has actually been cheaper here in sweden than the suggested retail price "over there"!

MikeC, do you have any experience with installing an OS (like win2k) on a USB drive? Can the windows installer even detect USB-drives?

just bought a 2GB fast DOK. performance is comprable to the reviewed pocket drive.

I don't see the point. why is this such a breakthrough? the only added value is the HW encryption. and that can be done on flash. with 4GB DOK available cheap - no point to go spin drive - silent or not.

my 2c

I've had a 5gb version of this pocket-drive for a few months.....nice. As the review states....totally silent unless pressed against your ear. I like the retractable cord a bunch. It's a versitile device, and fast enough for most uses.

First of all, it is a lot cheaper. About 30-50% cheaper than a 4gb flash card with converter. Second, it does not wear out like CF cards that have a limited read/write access.

Really old and cheap flash has 10,000 read/write cycles. As long as you don't put a swap file on it, you won't write more than once a day average on a single sector. So it breaks after 27 years. Ergo: for most applications the "limited" read/write access of flash is not a problem at all.

Still a 1yr warranty on these external drives vs 5yrs for the internal bare drives.

You have to think about the environment. An internal drive rarely takes any physical abuse...it's warranty claims come from internal failures (and maybe overheating). An external drive is getting dropped, squashed, jostled, left in cars in the heat, left out in the cold, and experiences wild swings in ambient temperatures....not recipes for long life.

imo that tiny drive would be PERFECT if its capacity was rougly doubled to about 10gb

I amend to something clearer: "still better to put a 5yr warranteed internal drive in your own external enclosure than buy a 1yr external drive from the same mfgr".

Intersting review. I've had the 5GB pocket drive for a year or so, and in that time have not been able to boot it using syslinux (a good bootloader for emergency purposes) as the drive is formatted in FAT-32, and I was unable to change the partition table to create a smaller partition formatted in FAT-16 Have they changed something so you can do this in the 6GB (and presumably 12GB, which interests me) version?

As a point of interest, mine has survived several drops and is still functioning.

As of 3.00, FAT-32 is supported. http://syslinux.zytor.com/history.php

Documentation has been somewhat lacking, but the tool improves steadily. Reliability has increased substantially. I was able to resolve some gnarly DSL boot issues by building my USB pendrive with syslinux 3.11 rather than the DSL-supported 2.04.

My testing was done by borrowing the syslinux 3.11 from Knoppix 5. Of course, you can go for the official version at http://freshmeat.net/projects/syslinux/

Really

Just shows how much attention I have paid to it recently. Looks like I'm going to have some fun![/b]