Have Hard Drive, Will Travel

Hard disks are fragile creatures, so while they provide fast transfer rates and high capacities, they don't make the best storage devices for the road. But now, IBM is attempting to change things by mounting its shock-resistant Travelstar 2.75-inch 8GB drive in a toughened case to produce the Travelstar 8E ($380 street).

Even with its outer case, the Travelstar remains compact, measuring 1 by 4.3 by 6.8 inches, and weighing about 12 ounces. (The PC Card and cable weigh an additional 4.5 ounces.) To install the drive, you simply plug the PC Card interface into your notebook's PC Card slot and run the integrated cable to the drive. The 8E draws from the notebook's power, so there's no AC adapter to lug around.

The Travelstar 8E comes loaded with NovaStor Backup SE, a "light" version of DataZone's backup program; KharmaPi, a real-time backup program from Maxtor; and RioPort software, which allows you to locate, retrieve, play, organize, and download MP3 files to a portable MP3 player.

The drive is hot-pluggable with Windows 98; in our test, the operating system recognized the PC Card interface immediately, and supplied its own driver. The first time you attach the drive to your notebook, a setup program also pops up, offering you the chance to install the software.

Slow and Steady

Our test system was an IBM ThinkPad i Series 1480 with a 466-MHz Celeron processor and 64MB of SDRAM. We tested performance informally by copying 430MB of files to and from the Travelstar--using our notebook's internal hard drive--and we also copied the data between folders on the Travelstar itself. Copying the 430MB from the 1480's internal drive to the TravelStar took 7 minutes 58 seconds, achieving a rate of about 900 kilobytes per second. Copying the data back to the internal drive took 7 minutes 17 seconds, a rate of about 985 KBps. For reference, transfer rates of 4 megabytes per second are common between quick hard drives on desktop systems. Depending on the system you're using, Iomega's USB Zip drives transfer at rates in the neighborhood of 700 KBps. And typical packet writing speeds with 4X CD-RW drives are about 600 KBps. As you can see, because of its IDE PC Card interface, the 8E won't break any performance records.

The Travelstar 8E was even slower transferring data across its own platter, taking a whopping 14 minutes and 53 seconds to copy 430MB back onto itself--a rate of only 482 KBps. Of course, such a transfer has to cross the relatively slow PC Card IDE interface twice, once to load into the system's main memory, and again to get back onto the drive. A 430MB transfer between separate folders on the ThinkPad i1480's internal hard drive took only 4 minutes and 33 seconds--a much quicker 1.56 MBps. Since users will spend most of their time copying files to and from the 8E, the poor intradrive transfer rate is of minor significance.