Portable hard drive space is becoming more and more of a necessity. Flash drives are the optimal solution, but they are still very expensive per megabyte and they don’t support large storage space. So instead of lugging around a large desktop hard drive, why not carry a small portable hard drive? They may not have the huge storage space that desktop hard drives have, but they strike a good balance between physical size and storage size.

Features

• Capacities: 4GB, 6GB, 8GB, 12GB
• Microsoft® Windows 98SE/ ME/ 2000/XP & Mac OS 9.0+ systems
• Hi-Speed USB 2.0 (480 Mbps)
• USB powered – no external supply needed
• Allows device hot-swapping(Plug and Play)

The hard drive is very simple. It does not come with much. Included are a small USB cable and a case. The USB cable is only about 9 inches long. The case is useful for protecting the drive from scratches, but not much else.

Design

Because of its simplicity there is not much to talk about. The drive is about 2 inches wide and long, and about .5 inches thick. This makes for a very small drive. The outside is made out of metal and plastic. The silver part is metal and the black part is plastic.

The USB port tucks nicely into the drive case. This is nice because it makes it more compact and it will not break off when it is tucked away. Although, the hinged port is probably also the most likely failure point. The USB port has four positions; closed, and three open positions.

The only other feature is the activity light. It is just a blue LED that lights up when the drive is in use.

The drive uses a small micro drive. Because these are becoming more popular

with devices like the iPod and such you can probably find new ones to upgrade the drive with.

Performance

Performance and capacity are definitely the most important features of an external hard drive. You certainly don’t want to wait forever while a slow drive copies and moves your data back and forth.

With support USB 2.0 you can certainly expect to get the fastest speeds available. Keep in mind that you will never get the full benefit of USB 2.0 because the small hard drives have a maximum speed that is well below the maximum speed of USB 2.0. The maximum speed for USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps (60 MBps).

These external hard drives use 1 inch Seagate ST1 drives. These hard drives use many of the latest technological advancements that improve speed and low operation noise. These advancements include RunOn Technology, High shock tolerance, ATA Flex and CompactFlash interface, and 2-Mbyte buffer.

I ran some quick benchmarks using SiSoftware Sandra. Before I ran the tests, I emptied the hard drive of everything. These are the results:

	512B Files Test	32kB Files Test	256kB Files Test	2MB Files Test	64MB Files Test
Read	1855 kB/sec	4648 kB/sec	6012 kB/sec	6007 kB/sec	6554 kB/sec
Write	21 kB/sec	164 kB/sec	960 kB/sec	2492 kB/sec	3277 kB/sec

Warranty and Support

The drive comes with a one year warranty against manufacturing defects. This is a bit weak as far as warranties are concerned. I would like all products to have at least a 3 year warranty.

I recently had the drive fail on me, it just stopped working. I think it was the USB port that broke. Probably putting it in and out of my computer put strain on the connector and broke it. I immediately contacted Edge Tech Corp tech support to explain my problem. After a few emails back and forth they sent me an RMA number and a UPS shipping label with next day shipping. They received it on Thursday, November 9th. So far I have not heard back from them. Up to this point, I have been very impressed with the responsiveness of their support. Hopefully they don’t let me down by either not honoring the warranty or by taking a really long time to return my drive.

Conclusion

External hard drives are always more expensive than the equivalent internal hard drive. This is because of all the small size of the hardware and difficulty in manufacturing such small pieces. The 4 GB DiskGo drive costs $99.95, whereas I was able to find a full size 4 GB hard drive for only $9. The warranty is really the only fault. The performance is good, the capacity is great, and the whole thing just works really well. If you are in the market for a small, but high capacity hard drive then you really don’t need to look any further than the EDGE DiskGo portable hard drive. Be sure to compare prices before you buy.

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