|
The Quest For A Well Rounded Mobile Drive
We've all had our share of mobile drives. Zip drives are possibly the most common. They plug into the parallel port, something every PC has, and the disks are cheap. But just as floppies have become obsolete for anything short of flashing a BIOS because of their small capacity, Zips have become ineffective for most mobile storage uses because 100 MB is not enough space for most files.
Sure, Zips are now available as a 250, but they don't work as 250 MB disks in earlier Zip drives and the disks cost more. Jaz drives are faster and hold more, but the drives and disks are quite expensive.
CDs? Good idea. CDRs are cheaper then ever, can be made mobile with an enclosure and blanks are certainly cheap. But burning CDs are still a slow process, especially in an external enclosure.
How about a hard drive in a portable enclosure? Portable hard drives are not a new concept at all. Parallel port units have been around for ages. Over 6 years ago, I had a parallel enclosure for my hard drive, but now we are in the age of USB and not too soon, either. Hard drives have become very inexpensive as well.
So what do you get when you put a $70 20GB hard drive in a $100 portable USB enclosure? You get beaucoup storage space at fairly decent speed!
>> Introducing The Mapower MAP-63C
|
