The Hindu : Business : Hold 5 gigabytes in your palm!

The Hindu : Business : Hold 5 gigabytes in your palm!

BANGALORE, APRIL 9. The world's "first" Pocket Hard drive, a tiny disk that fits in the palm of one's hand and offers 5 gigabytes - that's 5 billion bytes - of storage, has come to India. The drive which looks like an old fashioned pocket watch and weighs just 63 grams, is now available through retailers in most metros. The Hindu was provided one of the first pieces for evaluation of what is, arguably, the next leap in high-density portable storage, offering PC and laptop users, the ability to carry what is virtually the entire contents of a computer in their pockets.

The 7.3 cm diameter disk (the actual drive inside is 1 inch or 2. 54 cm in size) from U.S.-based computer storage major, Seagate, comes in a shock-proof metallic shell with a short cable; the connector retracts like the string of that toy of yesteryear, the ``yo-yo.''

It plugs into the Universal Serial Bus (USB) socket that is now standard on all desktop and notebook PCs. If the PC runs the latest Windows XP or Mac OS software, the drive will be instantly ``recognised'' by the machine and no further software tweaking is required.

However, the CD provided with the Pocket Drive allows users of PCs with earlier versions of operating system (OS) to install the required software. Current (OS) users too, will benefit from installing the latest USB driver software (2.0) since this will significantly kick up the speed at which files can be swapped between PC or laptop and the pocket drive.

A tool kit provided on the pocket drive takes up around 7 MB of space; but the utility allows the user to format and partition the disk, introduce passwords and even make it `bootable' just like a conventional PC drive.

These features take the Seagate drive beyond the currently popular ``Flash Memory'' type USB `pen drives' that come in various sizes from 64 MB to 1 GB.

One could install the key software tools used on a PC, like an office suite or a browser, in around half an hour, so that when plugged into any public computer, say in a cyber cafe, one gets the comforting feel of working on one's own home computer, with all the archival folders readily available.

The 5 GB capacity is good for a typical 75 hours of music in MP3 format; some 4.5 hours of video or 1250 photos.

The product recently won the CES Innovation Award 2005 for outstanding design at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Mr Amit Gupta, who represents Fortune Marketing, Seagate's main all-India retailers at the Chennai end, told The Hindu today that the 5 GB pocket drive was being currently offered at Rs. 10,000 while the 2.5 GB cost Rs. 8,500. Internationally these drives are being sold between $300 and $350.

Seagate has also launched in India, external hard drives in 3.5 inch format in the 160 GB to 400 GB range.

In recent weeks both Seagate and Hitachi have launched even bigger capacity 6 GB pocket drives abroad, mirroring a recent finding by the IDC that the number of such compact storage devices is set to explode globally from less than 18 millions in 2004 to over 100 millions by 2008.