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Rating: 
Summary: LaCie PocketDrive U&I portable hard-drives
Review: I am reviewing the 30Gb PocketDrive U&I - Amazon have stopped selling it for some reason - but if the 60Gb device is anything like it, it will be well worth the recommendation.Each PocketDrive is the same physical size, regardless of disk capacity. I have used my 30Gb device interchangably with three different machines, all running Windows 2000 (two Dell desktops and a Sony VAIO laptop). I have had no problems whatsoever, even doing a lot of read/writing to it at the summit of a mountain (elevation ~13,800 ft.) Installation was trivial - plug the drive in, Windows automatically recognises it and assigns a drive letter. No drivers to manually install, no awkward setup. The only task you have to do the first time you connect it is format it - and that is easy through the Windows Computer Management console (under Windows 2000). Swapping the drive to another machine for file transfer is similarly painless. Plug it in and a few seconds later it is recognised. The drives have USB 2.0 and Firewire (IEE1394) interfaces, both of which are extremely fast. An advantage of using FireWire is that a separate power supply (supplied) is no longer needed; just plug the drive into a six-pin FireWire port and off you go. If you need to add a FireWire card to your desktop, I recommend the Adaptec AFW-4300 1394/FireWire Card which I have used without a problem in two machines. Although Windows prefers you to 'stop' external devices before you unplug them I have encountered no serious problems unplugging the drive 'hot', as long as it is not writing. For example, when playing MP3s stored on the drive through WinAmp, pulling the plug on the drive simply resulted in the buffer emptying out and then WinAmp looping the last few seconds of music it was playing. Nothing crashed, and plugging the drive back in followed by selecting the next song in WinAmp resumed normality. I recommend these products unreservedly. The only thing that would make them perfect is if they could dispense with the external power supply for USB connections. All in all, however, absolutely excellent devices.
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