After you attach the drive to the computer, you realize that this circle is nothing else but a LED indicator of the operational mode that signals in blue about the functional activity of the device. The information about the device is printed on the smaller side panel, opposite to the retractable interface connector. The connector can be firmly locked in two positions for convenience.

Now we can move on to the technical characteristics of the device. These are largely determined by the characteristics of the employed hard drive. It is a miniature 1-inch ST650211 CF drive from Seagate of the format of a standard Compact Flash memory card. Its capacity is 5 gigabytes which permits to move around considerable amounts of data, like several videos in the MPEG-4 format or a single image of a DVD Video disc. The declared data-transfer rate of the drive is 12MB/s; the device connects via the USB 2.0 interface. The Sony Micro Vault Pro USD5G is operational under an ambient temperature of 5 to 35°C. The dimensions of the drive are 50x73x13mm; its weight is 57g. There’s a utility preinstalled on the drive for synchronizing files.

The accessories to the device include a protective case, a user’s manual, and a warranty.

The average retail price of the drive is $215.

Testbed and Methods

I used FC-Test 1.0 and AIDA 3.95 as benchmarking tools. The testbed was configured like that:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB capacity
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4

I will compare the Sony drive with another external USB drive. It is the Seagate ST650211USB Pocket Hard Drive which we have discussed in one of our previous reviews called Seagate ST650211USB: External Hard Disk Drive to Fit into Your Pocket.