The news
Verbatim's Store 'n' Go USB Drive offers a rather neat counterpoint to another newsworthy hard disk unveiled at CES, Hitachi's 1Terrabyte 3.5in/7,200rpm offering, the 7K1000.
The Verbatim, due this month in the USA at $179, has a far smaller capacity than the Hitachi - just 12GByte - but contains a 1in hard disk and is reckoned to be little bigger than an ordinary USB flash-memory stick.
In fact, it's actually considerably bigger than any of the USB sticks we have but the dimensions are still staggeringly compact - 35 x 9.7 x 71mm (1.38 x 0.38 x 2.8in) - and the weight is just 28.35g (1oz).
As is increasingly common with large-capacity flash drives, the hard-disk-based Verbatim is being touted as a convenient way to take a suite of applications with you to run on any USB-equipped Windows PC.
To make this easier, the Store 'n' Go USB Drive comes with a pre-installed utility - Mobile Launchpad - for downloading suitable portable applications. The same utility is said to give easy access to personal files and data on the drive without having to load them onto the PC.
A flip-out USB connector is used to keep down the size and the drive comes with an extension cable to simplify plugging it into awkwardly-placed USB slots.
We said that the capacity is "only" 12GB but Verbatim puts this in context by observing that the drive is big enough to hold tens of thousands of documents or six hours of DVD-quality video.
The author of this piece also feels it worth noting that, less than 10 years ago, he was hopping up and down with delight at the arrival of the first sub-£400 12GByte hard disk drive, the Quantum Bigfoot TX.
That cost £399, was in a 5.25in form factor and weighed 2.5kg - not far short of 100 times more than the Verbatim - and it probably wasn't any faster.
Check out Verbatim's press release on page two and share your thoughts about hard-disk progress in this thread in the CES 2007 forum.
HEXUS.links
HEXUS.community :: discussion thread about this articleCES 2007 - Las Vegas :: Hitachi promises first 1TB hard disk drive this quarter!
CES 2007 - Las Vegas :: Hitachi Terabyte drives here & now, & next-gen, dual-format writers in pipeline
CES 2007 - Las Vegas :: All HEXUS coverage
