At first glance, the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive appears very similar to a yo-yo in both size and mechanics. No, you won't be able to perform tricks with it, but … the attached USB cable does wrap around the device in a stringy sort of way. The drive comes loaded with disk utilities which perform functions like creating a boot disc (if your motherboard supports USB booting), and also disk formatting.

The drive has a speed of 3600 RPM, which is half the speed of most modern drives.

Using the same 128MB test file we used in our October 2004 Labs, we found the drive took 54 seconds to write the file, and 19 seconds to read it back. This puts it between the Pretec iDisk Tiny and the Lexar Jump Drive in performance terms. We then tried a larger 2GB file – which it wrote in 293 seconds, and read back at an even slower 304 secs. As a replacement hard drive it performs ok, but HDD-intensive tasks such as video editing are not recommended.

On a bang for buck scale, it performs similarly to a 128 USB stick, but has almost 40 times the space, and at only three-and-a-half times the price it is a good deal. Conversely, it competes directly with other mini-hardrives which have capacities of up to 40GB e.g. Iomega’s new USB 2.0 Mini Hard Drive with 40GB drive retails for under $300.

So, the market for the Seagate Pocket Drive is a hard one to pick, it’s relatively small and semi-water resistant, but carries the same amount of data as a DVD-R. As such, a DVD writer would be a better option for data backup. The advantage of the Seagate is that it carries its own drivers on the disk so is truly plug and play, and so would be good for transferring large files between PC’s without DVD drives. But as DVD writers are edging towards the $100 mark, the appeal of the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive is increasingly limited in the face of other competition.