Portable USB Drive from WD
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The unit is small enough to fit in a pocket at 14x9x2cm. It has a mini USB connector on the rear behind a rubberised door. While I would not recommend you drop it, two sides and the base are covered in rubber and would give you some protection.
This unit is 80GB and I am not even going to try to work out how many floppy discs worth this would hold. This is a USB2 drive that will still work correctly (but more slowly) on machines that only have USB 1.1 ports.
I used this unit on two machines one with USB2 and one without. The one without managed just close to the 12mbps maximum dependant on the make up of files it was copying. The USB2 machine was very fast and with small amounts of data I was in fact unsure that the data had been copied before checking as the movement was so fast. So larger amounts of data had to be used for timings these were made up of a mix of small (up to 20KB) many mid size files (average 500-800KB) and some large files (up to 30MB).
The mid sized files were mainly .jpg files (this is an ideal drive for storing photos) and although the average was 500-800KB there were some at 200KB and others at well over 1MB. There was no significant speed differential when copying to or copying from the WD (Western Digital) drive. The differential was when the other device was USB 1.1 or USB2.
I found it easiest to time overall with the mixed bundle of files that totalled around 100MB, I did this test several times and each time altered the mix of files so there was not a preponderance of any one size of file.
USB2
The total average time to transfer 100MB of data was only 10 seconds. This did increase by a couple of seconds when a lot of small files were included and reduce slightly when large files were in the ascendancy. The same files transferred slightly quicker when they were all placed in a single folder.
USB 1.1
Now when the same files were transferred using the USB 1.1 machine they took a minimum of 108 seconds, this was with only fifty files involved and them all being in a single folder.
My very first test of any size involving 24 files that came to a total of 20MB produced remarkably comparable results of 4seconds USB2 and 45seconds USB 1.1 these figures give a ball park 11 fold increase, not what you might expect as USB2 is sold as up to 480mbps (compared to up to 12mbps) for USB 1.1 still this is in real world tests where other calls are made on the PCs.
I was more than happy with the results and this small neat unit would be highly acceptable if someone wants to get me one. Searching through the various sites I can find this drive at a little under £100 but this will need P&P to be added.
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