Something I’ve been seriously considering buying over the past 6 to 8 months is a portable hard drive. I tend to do a lot of work at a number of different computers, and have typically used ZIP or floppy drives to take files with me, but that gets old quickly.
There are a number of portable hard drive solutions that use USB or Firewire interfaces, but they all tend to have serious drawbacks for my intended use. Almost all such drives require external power supplies, for example, and I’m really not excited about having to carry around a power cable. There are a few portables that use batteries, but then you’re limited to three or four hours at most before recharging (plus the available battery driven drives haven’t received very good reviews).
That’s why I’m very excited about the Pockey Drive. This is basically a 2.5″ hard drive in an case that’s almost as small as my Palm, so it’s very portable. It uses a USB interface so it’s going to be slow, but given how common USB ports are these days, the tradeoff in compatibility is worth it to me.
More importantly, though, the Pockey Drive is engineered to take all the power it needs directly from the computer to which it is connected — no power cables needed, thank you very much (does the Fire Wire standard support this sort of feature?)
The price is right, too, ranging from $250 for a 6 gigabyte version to $400 for a 20 gigabyte version. Sure, paying $400 for a 20 gigabyte drive is not cheap compared to the 80 gigabyte drive you can pick up for under $300 these days, but I’m thinking more along the lines that I once paid $500 for two 250 megabyte drives and thought I had a killer system. $400 for 20 gigabytes the size of my Palm? Bargain-o-rama.
Although the drive has been available in Korea for awhile, it’s just hitting the U.S. so there aren’t any reviews I could find that are in English (and my Korean is not very good). PCWorld does give the Pockey drive high marks in passing as part of a larger article on portable storage, saying that the drive “installs like a charm…Our test Pockey seemed sturdy, but all hard drives should be handled with care.”