Faster than a speedy flash drive
18 Jul 2008I’ve been looking at a number of things in the hours since my last post, but I’ve still a bit of work to do before I start blogging about any of those. Instead I thought I’d share with you a bit about one of my favourite little gadgets - The Maxell 12GB Hard Drive.
USB2 hard drve the size
of a match box. Fed up with the poor speed of my USB drives
(and I’ve had some lightning fast ones), I started having a look
around for an even faster one that could match the speed of my Western
Digital 120GB USB hard drive. Unfortunately the flash drives all seem to
be suffering from a bit of a read lag and a lot of a write lag. Anyway I
managed to find the Maxell drive on
Play.com
and with a discount at the time I managed to get one for under £25.
Around the size of a match box it has a fold out USB connection and contains a tiny hard disk - think IBM micro drive but more robust. the transfer speeds are listed as 480mbps (USB 2), but whilst it is fantastic and much faster than any flash drive I’ve used or seen, I’m not sure that’s a true reflection of its actual speed.
In any event it lives in a little neoprene pouch (it comes with this and a USB extension cable) on my key ring and travels everywhere with me. At 12GB I can keep all my run of the mill data with me (excluding photos and music mainly). I have bits and pieces relating to work, personal development, personal documents, information about hobbies and groups I’m involved in, software installation files and of course a suite of portable applications.
Whilst the hard drive comes preloaded with Ceedo I have to confess I’m a portableapps.org man myself and I have one of the branched USB application launchers managing my vast array of techie-tools and productivity software.