Product: Archos ARcDisk Price: $2,250 Pros: Fast speed, high capacity, portable storage Cons: Firewire would be nice
Smaller than a floppy disc and weighing just 75 grams, the 20-gigabyte ArcDisk from United States mobile storage and entertainment device maker Archos can fit in most pockets. Using a USB 2.0 interface without a power cord or external power supply, the ArcDisk is basically a portable laptop hard drive, ideal for anyone who needs to transport files from one PC to another.
It pops up as another hard drive on your computer, similar to using a flash memory card. But with a rotation speed of 4,200 rpm, transferring and copying files to and from the portable drive is perceptibly quicker than from some flash cards.
The ArcDisk's appeal is the same as the tiny thumb drives that many are carrying around, except that it has many times the storage capacity. The ArcDisk is available in two storage sizes - 20 gigabytes and 40GB.
Archos claims the ArcDisk has the lowest cost per megabyte of any storage device, priced at $2,250 for the 20GB model. This works out to be more than $1 per megabyte.
However, it isn't the cheapest on the market. The ArcDisk's main competition is the Storix Fusion Drive, which is a 20GB to 60GB portable hard drive featuring three interfaces - USB, USB 2.0 and Firewire, which allows much faster transfer speeds. It works on both Mac and PC platforms and, like the ArcDisk, does not need an external power source.