Seagate's mobile backup wins on convenience

Seagate's 5GB Pocket Drive and the 400GB external hard drive.

If you own a PC, one of your pre-occupations will be the size of the hard drive. In these media-rich days when the mp3, mpeg video file and multi-gigabyte software packages vie for space on your hard drive, 40GB (gigabytes) of storage doesn't cut it any more.

You need a minimum of 100GB of hard drive storage to cope with the digitisation of your photo and music collection and to install popular PC games such as Half Life 2, which alone consumes 4.5GB of storage space.

Then you face another problem - where to back up such a large quantity of data.

You can easily back up all your crucial documents and pictures on a $30 256MB (megabyte) flash key chain. You already have the music and software packages on CD, so if that dreaded hard-drive failure strikes, you can rebuild your digital collection.

But there's great convenience in having a back-up hard drive mirroring everything held on the computer which is used every day and is susceptible to bumps, power surges and theft.

In this area US hard-drive maker Seagate is making its play.

Seagate's drives are already inside many PCs sold around the world, but you wouldn't know it unless you pulled the cover off.

With a new line-up of USB-based external hard drives, Seagate enters the retail space with lightweight, portable drives from 2.5GB to 400GB.

The 5GB Pocket Hard Drive version looks and feels like a yo-yo, a USB 2.0 cable extending from it for easy "plug and play" with your computer. Installation is a breeze. Windows XP and Mac OS X will identify it immediately and display it as another drive.

The drive is powered through the USB connection, which also delivers impressive data transfer speeds as long as your PC supports the USB 2.0 standard.

Small enough to slip into your pocket, the pocket drive will hold 74 hours of reasonable quality mp3 music or 140 hours of Microsoft's wma format tunes, 4000 1MB photos or 4.5 hours of digital video.

A blue light will blink as the Pocket Drive transfers data. The hard drive is enclosed in a shock-proof case and covered by a one-year warranty.

On the Pocket Hard Drive and accompanying CD resides the Seagate "Toolkit", a basic software package that provides limited functionality. You can password-protect your hard drive, partition it, write-protect the data held on it and make the hard drive a bootable disk.

That's about as far as it goes, with auto back-up functions reserved for higher-capacity drives.

With 1GB Secure Digital (SD) cards in the market and 2GB cards making their debut in Japan, flash memory has become the standard for mid-range storage needs.

But the trump card for hard-drive makers such as Seagate is their price. Hard drives, even miniature ones, can offer higher capacity at a lower price than flash memory rivals.

The average price for flash memory has been US$100 ($142) a gigabyte, whereas hard drives average US$400 for 400GB.

As Seagate explains, it's "100 times less" expensive to offer 400GB on a hard drive than with flash storage.

You could buy an iPod and use the world's most popular digital music player as a back-up hard drive. But that's not so convenient when you want to load up the iPod with tunes for a long trip. The 4GB iPod costs around $450 and the 20GB version is more than $600.

Seagate is also challenging SD and Memory Stick digital cameras with a Compact Flash photo hard drive. It's the same size as lower capacity CF cards which are supported by millions of high-end cameras already in the market, but uses a miniature hard drive rather than flash-based storage. A 5GB hard drive can hold up to 4000 high-resolution photos.

At the top of the range is a 400GB external drive the size of a lunchbox which can be stacked vertically or horizontally. That can back up your computer's entire hard drive at the press of a button.

If you are using back-up software such as Symantec's Ghost, you can create a mirror image of your hard drive and transfer it to the portable drive.

Seagate 5GB pocket drive

* Pros: Self-powered, fast data transfer, lightweight.

* Cons: 5GB version lacking functions such as auto back-up.

* Price: $399 (5GB), $639 (100GB), $699 (400GB).

* Herald rating: 7/10.

* www.seagate.com.