Clik and Dock

Small is good, particularly when you're on the go. When it comes to portable storage, Iomega's Clik PC Card Drive is hard to beat: The lightweight, credit card-size device accepts Iomega's 40MB Clik disks, and slides effortlessly into a Windows notebook's PC Card slot. Now Iomega is going one step further with the Clik PC Card Dock, a USB desktop companion for the drive that can be used with both Macs and PCs. The $50 dock makes the Clik PC Card Drive a fully hot-swappable solution for transferring files from notebook to desktop.

Capacity vs. Portability

There are plenty of removable storage solutions for notebooks--including LS-120 drives, PC Card-based hard drives, CD-RW drives, and Iomega's Zip and Jaz drives--that offer far greater capacities and lower per-megabyte costs. But none provides the combination of portability and convenience that the $200 Clik PC Card Drive does. Also, the Clik medium is still inexpensive enough that, unlike with a $130 40MB CompactFlash card, you can feel comfortable leaving a Clik disk with a colleague. Purchased in packs of 10, Clik disks can cost as little as $10 apiece.

Because it's a standard Type II PC Card, the Clik PC Card Drive requires no wires, no cables, and no power source--you don't even need new drivers. When you're not using the card, you can safely leave it partially inserted in a PC Card slot. If you forget to remove the drive, odds are you'll still have battery power left in your notebook when you return; unlike a PC Card modem, the drive draws minimal power, as it remains asleep unless you're accessing it or writing to it.

To get started, you simply insert the drive into your notebook's Type II PC Card slot; the first time you do so, Windows (95, 98, NT, or 2000) will automatically recognize the drive as a standard IDE disk drive, and will install that driver accordingly. The drive is then listed as a device under the disk drives section of the Windows system settings. No proprietary drivers or other software are required for the drive to be installed properly, although Iomega does provide its IomegaWare package for accessing a handful of utilities, as well as for assigning drive properties and drive letters to the different Iomega devices you may have installed. Using the supplied Iomega driver also makes handling the drive on notebooks that have CardBus services enabled easier and more reliable.