Digital Trends

Seagate 5GB Pocket Drive

February 21st, 2005 | by Dan Gaul

Features and Design

The Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive won a CES 2005 Innovation award, and it's easy to see why.  Available in 2.5 GB and 5 GB models the Pocket Hard Drive measures in at a tiny 0.71 inches tall and just over 3 inches in diameter.  It weighs a meager 2.2 ounces.  It's so small and light you can easily put it into your shirt pocket and barely notice it.  The drive inside the silver and black plastic housing is a 1-inch pocket hard drive with a built-in, retractable USB 2.0 cable which is tucked ingeniously within the black plastic housing; just rotate the silver cover to expose the cable and pull it out.  The drive is a 3600 RPM, 2MB cache drive manufactured by Seagate and is powered through the USB cable eliminating the need for a separate power cord.  On the bottom of the housing are two wide rubber feet to keep the Pocket Hard Drive from slipping when placed on flat surfaces.  A blue light eliminates whenever the drive is accessed or writing, giving it some cool factor while at the same time providing feedback that the drive is working.

Seagate touts that the Pocket Hard Drive is hot-swappable — you can connect or disconnect the drive without turning off your computer.  However, this is true for almost all USB type devices, including cell phones, external USB hard drives and portable devices (that may also use hard drives for their storage.)

The software package that comes with the Pocket Hard Drive, called Toolkit, works extremely well.  Toolkit provides various tools and security features including write protection, a partition manager with the ability to create a secure partition, and the ability to restore factory settings among others.  You can also make the Pocket Hard Drive a bootable disc using Toolkit, which is outstanding idea which can come handy to many people like System Administrators.

The Pocket Hard Drive can have up to two partitions: a public partition and a private partition.  To keep your data from prying eyes, you can simply create a private partition and secure it with a password (including a optional password hint), all done via the Toolkit.  This is perfect for those carrying sensitive data and who want a secure way it.  To login to the secure partition, you must use Toolkit so make sure Toolkit is on the public partition for installation.  Once logged into the secure partition, you must logoff using the Toolkit if you wish to access the public partition. This is a little quirky, but is easy to get used to.

The well detailed Users Guide comes on the drive and provides plenty of information, including care tips, a Questions & Answers section, a Getting Started Guide and information specific to either Mac OS X or Windows.

Seagate provides a one year warranty on defective parts, but provides free technical support forever that follows the drive, even after the warranty expires. The Pocket Hard Drive seems fairly rugged.  Since it is a microdrive, it won't handle large impacts, but we did drop ours from desktop height to carpet several times without damaging the unit.  It also survived a rugged plane trip, being thrown in next to a laptop and several small boxes.