What is XXS, comes all dressed in rubber and keeps your secrets safe ? (Freecom Mobile Drive XXS 320 GB)

Member Name: isvikthere

Product:	Freecom Mobile Drive XXS 320 GB
Date:	25/07/09 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Extremely portable

Disadvantages: Minor concerns about heat dissipation and shortness of the USB-cable provided

Today's huge multimediafiles we either produce ourselves on our digicams, digital high resolution photocameras, or digital videorecordings from satellite, cable or terrestrial digital tv, or also happen to download from the net or even copy from family or friends, all make for a lot of data to store and ideally some of it needs to be backed up too.

That is why additional storage space is always handy and the more so if it can be easily carried around and doesn't take much hassle to be installed and connected.

Just for these needs Freecom, and numerous other manufacturers for that matter, today offer external harddrives, which basically come in two flavours : Either the regular sized 3,5 inch drives ; usually in sturdy housings with sometimes even a cooler installed but always with a separate power supply offering storage up and over 1,5 Terrabytes or the smaller 2,5 inch harddrives initially exclusively found built into laptop computers but now also available in their own housing powered through the USB port. The latter are mostly oriented for use with the said laptop computers but no one says they can't be used with desktop computers too. These types of exertnal harddrive are, until the even more portable USB-sticks catch up, the current standard for transporting a lot of data at once.

The description given that the Freecom XXS series of drives "is enclosed in a unique rubberized skin, making it the smallest and lightest 2.5" external drive in the world" is absolutely true. This because you really have nothing more than that : the harddrive which has but a mini-USB connector (so no possibility of hooking it up either true e-SATA or IDE) soldered on and then there is this rubber sleeve which serves as both as housing and protection. The easily removable rubber sleeve keeps the litle drive safe from dust, shocks and vibration but DOES NOT mean that you can use this exernal drive in wet or moist conditions !

Inside the rubber sleeve I thus discovered a SAMSUNG branded 2,5 inch harddrive, model HJM320JX with an indicated speed of 5400 rpm (typical for 2,5 inch laptop harddrives) and a theoretical capacity of 320 Gigabytes (to be really precise the size is 319.856.705.536 bytes), which after Freecom preformatted it for us in the FAT32 fileformat leaves for 298 Gigabytes to be used. This Samsung harddrive comes with 8 Megabytes of internal memory.

On the net I see that Freecom in the XXS series does already offer drives of even bigger capacity (500 Gigabytes) but obviously the race for always bigger drives rages on but you just have to weigh of storage capacity against cost to see where you get the best value for money.

I'd like to seize the occasion to express my surprise on how Samsung, almost out of nowhere, seems to have conquered a quite dominant presence on the harddrive scene. But a few years ago Samsung drives were nowhere to be found, and you only had but the great players such as Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, IBM (who were to sell their harddrive manufacturing to Hitachi some years ago), and Fujitsu-Siemens. So how Samsung made it so quickly to the forefront I do not know.

The value added by Freecom to the Samsung drive comes from the said rubber sleeve, offering both the housing and protection for the drive and the mini USB connector they tagged onto the harddrive. Finally Freecom has preformatted the drive in the FAT32 fileformat to offer maximum compatibility with on the one hand all flavours of the Windows operating systems and on the other hand MacOS. No mentioning is made of any Linux support but I'm sure that that won't pose a problem either.

Freecom also has pre-installed some tools on the drive, the whole installation takes up 129 Megabytes of free space on the drive itself, and mainly contains the product manuals in various languages in the PDF-format. It also offers a 90 days trial version of the CA Security tool. As I do not like trial software I do not intend to use it but I suppose it is a tool allowing to secure the data stored on the drive from unwanted access. The whole package Freecom preinstalled is accessible via an .exe file found on the drive and which starts up an easy navigation menu. The drive requires no special drivers to be recognised, just plug it into a free USB port on whatever you are connecting it to, and you are in business.

For optimum data transfer speed the drive supports the USB 2.0 standard (making for 480 Megabits/second) but is also backwards compatible with the older and considerably slower USB 1.1 standard (which is 60 Megabits/second).

I bought the drive just this week for 51 GBP (59 euros) online at Pixmania.com, and upon reception and unpacking I do have some concerns. The first is that harddrives tend to get hot when in use, so how the Samsung drive really copes with heat, especially over long periods of use, while being all draped in rubber I do not know. I can only hope that Freecom has tested this thouroughly and that operation and data storage won't be compromised during prolonged use. The instruction sheet does specify that the drive should not be used with an ambient temperature in excess of 35 degrees centigrade. The lower 5400 rpm speed on these small harddrives (compared to the 7200 or sometimes even 10000 rpm found on regular desktopcomputer 3,5 inch harddrives) guarantees that they are more silent, use less power and generate less heat.

My second concern is the provided mini-USB to USB connector cable. This is quite short, nothing more than a few inches, and offers no other option than the drive being placed exactly opposite the USB port you are plugging it into.

Finally - and I did allude to the phenomenon in another review - the letter X is still very hot for use in product names for the IT industry, the XXS used for this series of Freecom drives only confirms this. But here of course Freecom refers to the size of the drive which, as for clothes, is then to be translated into eXtra eXtra Small.

isvikthere July 2009

Summary: Palm computer sized external harddrive, handy and good value for money

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