usb drives

I was in the market for a portable drive when I found this beauty. In addition to a solid, rugged build, it's also quite simple to use, not too hard to look at (can you say techno fetish?), and fast enough. Perhaps it lacks the performance and space of a 160gb external that's the size of a dictionary, but for me, the portability means utility. I can use it more if I can lug it around effortlessly.

I also looked at creating a portable using a 2.5" laptop harddrive with a pre-made enclosure, but decided that you didn't really save that much more by making your own. And those were still about twice the size of this drive, which is based on the 1.8" Toshiba drives that are used by the Ipod.

One improvement I could see Archos offering (other than a larger size) is firewire connectivity. But if that increased the size of the drive, then I'd opt to stay with USB.

I bought this hard drive to use as offsite backup for my home PC. I basically take it to work and leave it there, and it saves me from having to burn a dozen CD-roms. I use Drive Image 7.0 to create automatic backups to an external usb hard drive that stays connected at home. I then quickly copy the backup file to the arcdisk (15 minutes for about 7GB) and take it to work. It's so small and portable, I really like it.

As far as the drive itself, there's not much to it. It didn't need drivers for Win2K, and was really plug and play. If you're going to use it for large backup files, like I do, you'll need to reformat it from FAT32 to NTSF so that it will accept large files (over ~2GB). Also, depending on whether your usb ports are powered or not, you may need to use the included power cord. I thought my usb ports at home were powered, but I was getting strange error messages from Windows, telling me that I was out of available ports. Once I plugged in the power cord, this error went away. At my office, the arcdisk needed no power. The usb power from the main motherboard port was enough. This is why I'm giving it 4 stars (doesn't work on all usb ports without adding power from its separate power cord).

Otherwise, it's very cool, very small, and quite functional. NB-- 20Gigs works out to only 18.5 GB, same as other drives (don't know why the mfrs don't just move to the same standard that consumers use.)

This hard drive is so tiny and it's kind of rugged on the edges for protection. It runs a little hot when being used. It's really fast too. usb 2.0 is a big plus for this. Installation was easy on win98se. but the usb cable is way too short but I think it's like that because this is more suited for mobile users - not desktop users. but still I like it. I got it for about 20 bucks cheaper at some other web site. Buy this thing!!!