Pocket hard drive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The pocket hard drive is a high capacity alternative to the flash drive. Although this device is somewhat larger than the flash drive, this device is still convenient to take to businesses and to transfer large amounts of data. These devices usually have a capacity of 4-8 Gigabytes. Some are round in shape and are based on USB; the USB cord is retractable in some for increased portability.

A Seagate Pocket hard drive, with USB cable extended. The model depicted has a 6GB capacity, however all Pocket drives manufactured by Seagate to date appear virtually identical.

The most common are those based on Microdrives. They aren't much larger than the drive they contain, and often have retractable USB plugs. They are meant to have the same practicality and ease of use of flash drives (Mass Storage Class drivers and portability), but they are still based on an actual (albeit micro-sized) hard disk with moving heads and spinning platters, so they are much less tolerant of abuse.

This device was first developed by Seagate Technology who themselves make the hard-drives contained in this unit but this type of harddrive was already being produced by IBM years earlier with the CompactFlash interface.

In 1999 IBM released the CompactFlash Microdrive along with a PCMCIA adaptor; since the CompactFlash and PCMCIA interfaces are electrically identical the adaptors contain no electronics of their own. This means that such adaptors were very cheap and often included for free with expensive Microdrives. Since PCMCIA slots are usually only found in laptops this was not a popular method for transferring files except in certain industrial applications where a lot of laptops are present. These devices are generally more compact than USB variants but since the drive has no protective plastic shell it is easily damaged.

It may be possible to break open such USB pocket hard drive and extract the drive itself and use it in another device such as a digital camera provided the drive is not made specifically for USB or ATA interface. Most of these devices are essentially a Microdrive and CF card reader permanently installed together.

This computer hardware-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.