Seagate 5GB Pocket Drive Review
By Dan Gaul
February 21st, 2005
Summary
Seagate, one of the most well-known hard drive manufacturers has stepped out from behind the curtain and has begun introducing several consumer level products to the industry. Seagate's USB 2.0 5GB Pocket Hard Drive is one of those devices. A portable microdrive tucked away into a small, circular, well designed plastic shell. It was envisioned by Seagate to provide consumers an easy, affordable, and convenient way to bring almost any type of data on the road with them. The Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Hard Drive has also won a CES 2005 Innovation award. So, does it live up to the hype?
Full Review
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.
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.
Conclusion
Affordable, small, convenient, stylish, functional. All of these are great descriptions for Seagate's Pocket External 5GB Hard Drive. With its small form factor you can take it with you anywhere easily and comfortably. It's convenient to not have to lug around a heavier and larger solution. It's silver and black housing is stylish, and the blue light will attract peoples attention. The Pocket Hard Drive is extremely functional as well. 5 GB is a perfect amount of size for taking data on the road. It can easily hold work documents, but can also hold a good amount of photos and media. Plus, the added benefits like the ability to create a secure, password protected partition or being able to use it as a boot disk provide numerous ways to use the Pocket Hard drive in a affective manner. For the price range, currently between $115 and $160, you can't beat the amount of storage you get. Comparable 4GB Flash drives can cost as much as $200 and most likely will not come with a great supporting software application. The Seagate Pocket Hard Drive definitely lives up to the hype it deserves.
Specs
- Interface: High-speed USB 2.0, Bus Powered
- USB Compatibility: Mass Storage Class, Bulk Only Transport
- Sequential read/write performance: 4MB/sec to 7MB/sec (typical)
- Operating Temperature: 0 to 40 C
- Non-operating Temperature: 0 to 70 C
- Acoustics: 2.2bels (typical)
- OS Compatibility: Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME
Warranty: 1 year defective parts, free tech support that stays with the drive forever.