As regular readers know I’m obssessed with hard drives — show me a new hard drive announcement and I start salivating like a Pavlovian dog — but even I don’t understand what Seagate is thinking with its 5gb Pocket Hard Drive.
It’s not that I don’t like the device. It’s got a 5 gb hard drive in a 3″ diameter enclosure with a nice retractable USB 2.0 cable. But the problem is the darn thing is going to retail for about $200.
Who is going to buy one at that price point? It’s probably overkill for people who are already using those small flash memory USB thumb drives. Seagate says people can use it to store music and photos, but why? For $250 you can get an iPod Mini that will not only store but let you play the music as well, and I’m not sure how many people there are who want to carry around a 5gb drive just for photos.
Looks to me like a product in search of a market.
Source:
Seagate hopes for big splash with small drives. Dinesh C. Sharma , CNET News.Com, October 25, 2004.