Digital Trends

Seagate 5GB Pocket Drive

February 21st, 2005 | by Dan Gaul

Setup and Use

We tested the Pocket Hard Drive on two machines, a Dell laptop and a test desktop system both running Windows XP.  Setup couldn't be simpler. All you do is plug-in the Pocket Hard Drive into your USB port.  Windows XP automatically detected the drive and installed the drivers for it.  On our desktop system, we were required to reboot and reconnect the drive, but on the laptop Windows did not require a reboot or a reconnect of the drive to see it.  After the drivers are installed, the Pocket Hard Drive is seen as a logical drive, showing up under My Computer.  Windows ME, 2000 and XP are supported along with Mac OS X.  Linux is not officially supported, but since it's seen as a logical drive the drive should show up and be functional without problems on your Linux system.

Installing Toolkit consists of running it off the Pocket Hard Drive and excepting the End User's License Agreement (EULA).

The USB cabled tucked inside of the Pocket Hard Drive is rather short, about 4 inches long.  Because of the length, it's very easy to use with a laptop without a bunch of cord clutter, but the cord was too short for practical use with a desktop unless your system has USB ports in the front of your case.  In our test system, we plugged it into a USB port on the back of the case and the drive had to dangle due to the cable length not being long enough for the Pocket Hard Drive to rest on top of the case.

To transfer files to the Pocket Hard Drive, it's just a matter of using Windows Explorer, like you would any other hard drive, and copying via Copy/Paste or Drag & Drop onto the drive.

Since the Pocket Hard Drive supports USB 2 (and is backwards compatible with USB 1.1), transfer speeds are fairly fast.  Seagate claims transfer rates using USB 2.0 to be between 4 MB/sec to 7 MB/sec, which is slower then many flash drives.  Our results where on par with what Seagate claims, it took less then 10 minutes to transfer a 4GB file to the drive.  A 5.5MB MP3 took under 2 seconds to transfer. 

If you are worried about noise, don't be.  The Pocket Hard Drive runs virtually silent.  We were unable to detect any noise emitting from it.