Bigger smaller drives

(via TechEBlog)

LaCie has announced a new 30 Gig USB hard drive. That wouldn’t normally be amazing, but this one is pretty stinking small. Called the Skwarim, this drive is handy for it’s portability and storage space, not it’s speed. In fact, speed test performed by The Register were rather disappointing:

The disk itself is a 4,200rpm job with 2MB of cache. I hooked up the Skwarim to Reg Hardware’s test PC, an Athlon FX-60 machine with a 250GB Serial ATA II HDD and formatted the pink ‘un as an NTFS volume. Copying across a 4.01GB test file took, on average, 213.84s – a thoughput of 19.22MBps. Duplicating the same file on the Skwarim itself took a whopping 16m 16.62s. That amounts to a mere 4.21MBps – rather less than the 12.16MBps I got using LaCie’s Rugged drive. The HD Tach benchmark suite measured a burst transfer rate of 35MBps and an average read speed of 19.5MBps.

Before showing the picture, you should know the drive will also be available in blue as well. It is also available in a 60 Gig model.

lacie-drive.jpg

[tags]USB Drive, LaCie[/tags]