Portable storage is becoming the latest buzzword for not only enthusiasts, but for business people as well. In today’s modern era of taking your work home, some sort of simple storage medium is becoming not only a convenience, but a necessity. Zip drives used to be the way to go but the cost and reliability factors of this type device forced most to look for better alternatives. Burning a CD is cost-effective, but you can’t reuse the media after you’ve finished with your work. Thumb drives became an immediate hit, but the smaller size limitations keep some folks from jumping on that bandwagon.
So the next logical step was some sort of small form factor hard drive and X-Micro has delivered it. While you won’t want to use it for game installations, it is more than capable of handling work data you take home or even backing up important data. For those motherboards that support booting from alternative locations like the USB port, you can even install an operating system onto this drive and have a completely different system at your immediate disposal. Only your imagination will limit you in regards to what you can do with this drive. Add to this the choice of sizes up to 40GB and you open up all kinds of windows of opportunity. This is truly the next step in modern technology and it will only go up from here.
As far as price is concerned, you can expect manufacturer’s suggested retail pricing to start at about $150US. The 20GB model tested in this review has a MSRP of $199.95 and is roughly the middle of the product line. This falls into the average price range for his type of component, so while you’re not getting a price lower than everybody else, you’ll get one that is competitive with other drives of this type currently available on the market. About the only real down side to this device is X-Micro’s choice of using a drive with only a 512KB buffer. They currently have similar models with 2MB buffers that would likely enhance performance. Other than this, however, you have a very good package here.
Bottom line... If you’re looking for external storage that gives you the speed and performance of an internal drive, look elsewhere. If, however, you’ve been looking at some means of storing a lot of data and also want the ability to drop it into your pocket, then the X-Micro DisGo deserves your full attention. With drive sizes up to 40GB and speeds that are not too far behind flash memory style thumb drives, the possibilities are nearly endless.
- Pros Real hard drive, not flash memory Very small size Decent performance Sizes available to 40GB
- Cons Price may be too high for many Only 512KB buffer
Rating – 9 out of 10 and TweakTown’s "MUST HAVE" Editors Choice Award!
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