Down with the floppy drive, hail to the Pocket USB Drive!

IOPlus sent us their own version of the Portable USB mini drives in a few different flavors of 16 ,32 ,64, and 128 megs. I must first of all say that these things rock! I absolutely hate floppy drives, and I am sure you do too. Everyone remembers backing up multi disk backups and having 1 of the disk’s fail at a later data. What a pain in the butt that was! Well, those days are over!

So far this little gadget has made my life a heck of a lot easier at work and at play. The other day I was doing upgrades on laptops, we ran out of blank CDs for data backup. Usually we would have to connect to the slow network and copy the files onto a shared directory. Well not this time, I simply plugged in my IOPlus PocketDrive USB and it loaded up automatically in seconds on the WIN2000 system. Minutes later I was done and the user’s data was backed up! No one should leave home without one of these.

Lets get on to the technical features.

• Read-Write Speed: 950KB/S (read), 600KB/S (write)
• PocketDisk is USB 1.1 compliant
• Write protection switch to prevent files from being over written
• Typical Data Retention: 10 years
• No driver installation required for Windows XP, 2000, Millennium Edition, Mac OS 8.6, Linux kernel 2.4.2 and above. Drivers included for Windows 98SE
• Capacities Offered: 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB and 512MB

With those features listed, the only drawback is the fact that it isn’t USB 2.0 compliant. 950k/s is fast but wont compare to the unreleased USB 2.0 version. Like the spec’s say, you don’t need any drivers for the most current operating systems, and if you are still on Windows 98/95, it’s time to upgrade my friend. The write protection lock is actually a little switch on the side that prevents it from being written on. It also has a software lock that requires you to put a password in before you can see the data. This is a great feature considering you carry it on your keychain and if you lose it, no one can see your data.

As for the physical specs;

• Dimensions: Length: 3 3/8″ (85mm), Width: 1″ (24mm), Height: 7/16″ (10mm)
• Weight: 15g (approximately)
• LED light indicates when drive is in operation

Basically the drive is about the length of a car key, and only a bit thicker than a matchbox, yet it probably weighs about the same! The LED indicator light lights up and flickers when you are transferring data to and from the device.

As a final word, NO ONE should be without one of these drives. You could be traveling and have your resume, IRC client, SSH Client, FTP configuration all on this disk. The price for these bad boys drops with each coming day as memory becomes cheaper and cheaper. If you still use floppies you are stuck in the stone age. They are the perfect gift for your techie child, or your favorite friend! At $40US you can’t go wrong!

Enter to win a 128MB IOPlus Drive