Hard disks come in a variety of shapes and sizes with external devices being the more adventurous and innovative with regards to the actual appearance of the product. One obvious example of this trend is the recently launched Micro Hard Drive from Imation. This is a 4GB drive which connects via a USB port and requires no external power source.

The drive could easily be mistaken for a padlock. The main body of the product is constructed of plated brass and houses a 4GB Toshiba 0.85 inch drive which is claimed to be the world's smallest hard drive. When you consider this unit measures just 40 x 16 x 82mm then it would be hard to argue with this claim.

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The rubberised USB lead acts as the pivoted loop of the padlock and, when not in use, it fits into a slot on the casing. It is held firmly in place by a simple locking mechanism which can be released by a slider switch on top of the device. This arrangement should enable you to clip the drive to a belt loop or any similar accoutrement when moving between locations.

Installing the drive, on its supported platforms, is just a matter of attaching the drive to a spare USB port. It will then be recognised and an icon added to your program manager. The drive can then be used as you would any detachable storage device by copying and moving data between locations. According to the supplied documentation, this drive is rated at 5MB per second for read and 3MG per second for write. However my tests were unable to match these figures when using USB 2.0. Copying 775MB of data (26 folders with 199 files) to the micro hard drive took 6 minutes 12 seconds which works out at approximately 2.1MB per second. Reversing the process took 3 minutes 20 seconds for a read speed rating of 3.9MB per second.

As with any type of removable media, security can be an issue. To help in this respect, Imation has included its Security Manager software on the drive. This software, once installed on the host computer, allows you to password protect the device to block unauthorised access. You can set up a synchronisation schedule to ensure that you have the latest version of your data on both the host and micro drive plus encrypt the data with 128-bit encryption. You can also use the software to restore files and folders from the drive to the host computer.

The Micro Hard Drive supports various platforms. You can use it with Windows Me or later; Mac OS 9.X or later, or Linux 2.4. Pricing has been set at £119.99.

http://www.imation.co.uk/products/micro_hard_drive/index.html