Apricorn Ships New Tiny USB Disk Drive

Apricorn has announced a new line of 1.8 inch hard drives: the Aegis Mini. Available in 30GB and 60GB sizes, with either USB or FireWire interfaces, the Aegis Mini hopes to stimulate the sluggish market for 1.8 inch consumer drives.

Inside the box is an Hitachi Travelstar C4K60 Slim, a lightweight, shock-tolerant drive. The tiny size ensures that even under-powered USB slots can probably run the disk with no problem. A short cable is built right into the case itself, and can snap in place out of the way when you want put the drive in your pocket.

Software bundled with the drive (want to give up the software in exchange for a lower price? dream on!), includes backup software: EZ Gig II for Windows and ShirtPocket SuperDuper! for the Mac. You also get Apricorn's own file synchronization software and built-in encryption software.

The Apricorn website lists prices of $169 for the 30GB FireWire, $159 for the 30GB USB, $249 for the 60GB FireWire, and $239 for the 60GB USB drives.

As expected for a 1.8 inch drive, speeds are not stellar. Apricorn specs are 4200 RPM and 12ms average seek times. Since most notebooks use fairly slow drives anyway, the Aegis Mini speeds are likely just fine for most users who don't need to perform disk-intensive operations on a regular basis.

The attractions of this product are obvious: 60GB that really does fit in your shirt pocket, light weight, and pluggable into any computer with a USB slot -- no need to lug around a power supply. The cons are equally obvious: a suggested retail price of nearly $6/GB (when 5.25 inch disk can be easily had for $.30/GB on sale), and a 1-year warranty that conveys just how confident the manufacturer is that yours will last more than a year.

It's exciting to see higher-capacity 1.8 inch drives targetted at the consumer. If I were spending somebody else's money, I would buy one of these puppies today! But clearly this isn't going to take off until the prices come down and the reliability (reflected in the length of warranty included) goes up. But, this is the way of new technology gadgets, and hopefully enough early adopters who don't mind the price will buy to accelerate the trend towards 1.8 inch drives that are better and cheaper.

July