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Flotec’s Pockey Drive vs. Trek’s ThumbDrive” –>
Flash Memory vs. Hard Drive – A Question Of Principle
In times where amounts of data are continuously increasing, there’s no single answer to how one can keep this data portable. Some people favour solutions such as Iomega’s ZIP, JAZ or Castlewood’s Orb drive. Others prefer to rely on recordable CDs or CD-RWs.
We reviewed several IDE and SCSI hard drives in the past months. This article will look at two portable data storage solutions. The first is Flotec’s Pockey Drive, which consists of a standard 2.5″ IDE hard drive built into a nice case with a USB connection. With a capacity of 6 GB, it holds much more data than the second storage device that we tested, which was Trek’s ThumbDrive. The Thumb Drive is based on Flash technology and is available with capacities between 8 and 256 MB (they sent us the 128 MB version). As you might have guessed from the name, it’s as big as a thumb. While the Pockey drive can be easily used to store and transport large amounts of data, the ThumbDrive is more suitable for people who always want to carry their projetct data around with them.
Flotec Pockey Drive
That’s what the Pockey Drive looks like. As mentioned in the introduction, Flotec uses a simple 2.5″ IDE hard drive (see next picture). Although the green plastic case looks pretty good, I would try to avoid dropping it or applying pressure to it.
Flotec uses a hard drive from Fujitsu (MHK-2060AT), which is widely used in many notebooks. 6 GB is still a common size for 2.5″ notebook hard drives, but bigger models could easily be used in Flotec’s Pockey as well.
In my opinion, a 2.5″ drive seems to be by far the best choice for a USB storage device. A 3.5″ drive would be too heavy as well as noisy, and its data transfer performance would be completely wasted on the 12 MBit/s limitation of USB. In addition, 3.5″ drives are more sensitive to physical shock than 2.5″ models. When engineers design drives for notebooks, the ability to withstand physical shock is a highly important aspect, and this aspect is something from which the Pockey Drive also benefits.
Flotec Pockey Drive, Continued
That’s the left side of the Pockey Drive. At the righthand edge you can see the USB connector. The power switch is clearly visible on the left side. Between them you can also see the activity LED – just like the one you should have somewhere on the front of your computer case.
Some of you might be wondering where the power supply connector is located. Actually, the drive is powered through the USB connector, which, incidentally, could never be the case with a 3.5″ hard drive. Recently, an increasing number of USB products have been released that do not require an external power supply. One of the most impressive examples is a scanner from Canon (CanoScan N650) that relies solely on a USB cable. The disadvantage of this scanner however is that needs to be connected right to the PC, because external USB-hubs are not able to supply the required power.
All Pockey Drives are shipped with a little bag which helps to protect the drive from dust and humidity – it’s a useful add-on, althought not entirely necessary.
Installing the Pockey Drive is pretty painless. After plugging the USB cable into a free port, you simply have to install the drivers. Flotec provides a full set of drivers for all common Windows versions (except Windows NT).
One thing that you should be aware of, though, is that the Pockey Drive is a bit different from other USB devices – before unplugging it, you should be careful to log off the Pockey Drive using the tray icon, otherwise, you could lose data! As long as you stick to this procedure, you should have no problems with data loss.
Trek ThumbDrive
Here’s a great picture – as you can see, the Thumb drive is only as big as a key, and it hardly weighs anything worth mentioning.
This is a picture taken from the front. The device is definitely small – in fact, the USB connector alone takes up about 1/4 of its total size! Basically, the device itself consists merely of Flash memory and a controller chip. But here you should also be careful – this little thing is probably easy to lose or misplace!
That’s about it for its physical features. The ThumbDrive comes with a disk containing drivers (unfortunately only Windows 98 drivers) and a short manual. Upon plugging it into a free USB port, a driver installation window pops up. After the driver has been installed on Windows 98 or ME, the little Thumb is assigned a new drive letter, making it instantly available as a standard removable device. Copying, moving or deleting data is no big deal – simply use Windows Explorer or any other file manager just as you normally would.
Test Setup
| Test System | |
| CPU | Intel Celeron, 500 MHz |
| Motherboard | Asus CUSL2, i815 chipset on-board USB controller |
| RAM | 128 MB SDRAM, 7ns (Crucial/Micron or Wichmann Workx) CL2 |
| IDE Controller | i815 UltraDMA/100 Controller (ICH2) |
| Graphics Card | i815 On-Board Graphics |
| Network | 3COM 905TX PCI 100 Mbit |
| Operating Systems | Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A Windows 2000 Pro 5.00.2195 SP1 |
| Settings | |
| Graphics Driver | Intel i815 Reference Driver 4.2 |
| IDE Driver | Intel Busmaster DMA Drivers 6.03 |
| DirectX Version | 8.0a |
| Screen Resolution | 1024×768, 16 Bit, 85 Hz Refresh |
Benchmarks – Flotec Pockey Drive
The maximum data transfer rate is ~900 KB/s. The hard drive could easily perform better than 15 MB/s, but, as mentioned before, the USB interface is limited to 12 MBit/s (~ 1.5 MB/s). If you want to copy more than one gigabyte at a time, I’d recommend a firewire solution, such as the drives from Western Digital, which have much higher transfer speeds.
Benchmarks – Trek ThumbDrive
Even though Flash memory is not as fast as a modern mechanical hard drive, it is not much slower than the Pockey drive when reading. However, write performance only reaches the level of a double speed CD-ROM drive!
This makes it sound terribly slow, but it’s actually enough for such a little storage device. In any case, copying a few megabytes onto the Thumb drive is not a problem.
Is That It for the Benchmarks?
In this case, any further benchmarks would be pretty useless. The access time for both drives is approximately 25 ms, which is acceptable for portable devices, seeing as this rate is still much faster than any CD-ROM or DVD drive. And neither temperature nor noise are issues either. The two devices do not get warm, and they produce only a little noise (Pockey) or no noise at all (ThumbDrive).
I doubt that anybody would seriously consider running applications or temp files of a removable/external drive, so I also saved the WinBench run.
Conclusion
As the ratio between price and capacity (price per MB) has been decreasing tremendously over the years, many people tend to forget that hard drives and recordable CDs are not always suitable for all applications and situations. This is exactly the niche that Pockey and the ThumbDrive want to target.
Furthermore, any computer that you buy today will have at least one USB port, whether it’s a notebook, desktop or server system. In addition, the new USB 2.0 will still function with USB-1 devices because the standard is based on the same connectors (and cables). Porting this standard to other operating systems should only be a matter of time, since USB also works with most types of Linux and BeOS. Even connectivity with Macs could easily be achieved.
Trek’s ThumbDrive is one of the smartest mobile storage systems available today, provided that you can live with a maximum capacity of 256 MB. This little device is as big as a key, so you can take it with you everywhere, storing it in your pocket or even in a box of cigarettes, just in case you want to hide it. Compare this to a CD or a hard drive – usually it’s quite difficult to take a CD or a hard drive with you without anybody noticing, while it is easy to do with a ThumbDrive.
The Pockey is a much better choice if you have to move larger amounts of data. The our sample had a 6 GB capacity; as you can imagine, this can also be easily upgraded merely by exchanging the hard drive. You just can’t expect this type of flexibility from a Flash solution. On the other hand, due to the mechanics of a hard drive (a rotating disk that is accessed by read and write heads), the Pockey will always remain sensitive to physical shocks.
