Labs

LaCie's 60GB Little Disk is noticeably smaller than the other portable USB disks in the group. This is because it has a 4,200rpm 1.8in hard disk rather than the 5,400rpm 2½in disks used by the other portables here. The Little Disk is around the size of a cigarette packet. It has a short retractable USB cable built in, and an extension lead is provided.

Not surprisingly the Little Disk was the slowest portable disk in all our tests because of its lower spindle speed. Although it was only one or two MB/s slower than the front-runners when reading files, it was noticeably slower at writing them. When writing large files, it was more than 5MB/s slower than the next slowest portable disk.

We can't recommend the Little Disk unless you absolutely need pocket-sized storage. It's slow, doesn't have much storage and costs a huge £1.36 per gigabyte.