Seagate Pocket Hard Drive

Affordable USB-based flash memory devices have pretty much killed the floppy disc drive as a portable storage option. This market has now seen a new entrant in the form of portable hard disks, and Seagate's new Pocket Hard Drive really is very portable.

With the ergonomic feel of a handheld stopwatch, the Pocket Hard Drive is palm-sized and insubstantial enough to be comfortably deposited in a shirt or trouser pocket. The device's pill-shaped case is just 7cm in diameter and it weighs 63g, which is lighter than a chocolate bar.

Clever design means that a quick turn of the wrist retracts the Pocket Hard Drive's USB2 connector and cable completely into the rather-too-plasticky case.

No external power supply is required, as the device draws current from the host computer. It's a neat and tidy gadget.

Although supplied with a suite of software utilities for partitioning, data write-protection and password security, none of these are required to operate the Pocket Hard Drive. Just connect it to a Windows XP/ME/2000/98SE or Mac OS9.2.2 or later computer and away you go.

A centre-mounted blue light twinkles as data is transferred. Repeated copying of 1GB of mixed file types took an average of a little more than nine minutes to complete. If your computer's Bios supports booting from USB, then the Pocket Hard Drive can be used as a boot drive.

While Seagate markets this as a 5GB drive your computer will accurately report the actual capacity to be 4.6GB. We'd also advise you to ignore Seagate's suggest selling price for the drive, as most retailers sensibly have: you'll have no problems buying the 5GB model for less than £90.