Product Reviews

As cool bits of kit go, tiny portable hard drives have got to be right up there. Archos' MiniHD is the latest of these 'pocket' drives to be available, although the adjective of choice for this particular device is 'palm'.

Once out of its box the MiniHD does not disappoint and the drive lives up to its palm appellation. It is comfortably the smallest drive that we have come across - weighing only 180g and measuring just 75mm x 120mm x 13mm.

We looked at the 6Gb USB version of the MiniHD, although there's also a 10Gb USB version and a 20Gb USB/FireWire drive. Archos has managed to get the MiniHD down to its diminutive size by not including any of the interface hardware within the drive enclosure as the USB cable connects directly to a fairly flimsy proprietary connector on the back of the drive. The same connector can also be used to take a FireWire cable. If you feel the need to upgrade from the painfully slow USB to the acceptable speeds of FireWire then Archos' FireWire Kit (FireWire cable plus driver software) is available for £49.

All versions of the MiniHD draw power directly from either the USB or FireWire port, however, this does mean that the drive has to be hooked up directly to the Mac or a powered hub in order to work.

Installation of the drive was frustrating. The printed manual directs you to install a driver from the Mac and PC-formatted CD-ROM, plug the drive in (no power supply is required) and away you go. Unfortunately the installer named in the manual doesn't appear on the CD.

Logic can

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normally get you over this kind of minor barrier although in this case it was made more difficult by the fact that you have to actually install not one but both of the arcanely named USB drivers that appear on the CD. The drive will not mount without both extensions.

Small is beautiful

We've been assured that there is an update to the documentation in the pipeline that will sort out the discrepancy but what should have been an extremely simple task turned into a slightly confusing one. And for a portable drive it's a shame that this device doesn't rely on Mac OS 9.1's standard USB extension set since you'll need to carry the installation CD around with you just in case you want to hook it up to someone else's Mac.

Apart from the drivers for the disk there's no other administration software. If the disk isn't already formatted (ours was) the Mac OS will do any formatting needed. A copy of Retrospect Express is supplied with the drive, which makes it a handy backup solution, but we'd much rather have seen some kind of disk management software instead or as well as retrospect.

Under test the drive performed as expected, with a data transfer rate of 0.78Mb/sec in MacUser's standard disk benchmark. This is slow but it compares favourably with other portable USB drives, which generally come in between 0.6Mb/sec and 0.8Mb/sec. Despite this we were disappointed in the poor performance of the USB interface. USB is horribly slow and unless you have no choice but to go for USB only, you should consider upgrading this drive with the Archos FireWire Kit.

For such a fantastically portable device the MiniHD was a little disappointing. The £149 price tag is good for this type of device, but for £20 more you can get a 10Gb LaCie PocketDrive with USB and FireWire as standard - albeit twice the size and weight of the MiniHD. If portability is absolutely essential then this drive may be worth the price, although only if you went for the FireWire upgrade.

PRICE: 6Gb USB only £149 (£175 inc VAT); 10Gb USB only £185 (£217 inc VAT); FireWire Kit £49 (£58 inc VAT); 20Gb USB/FireWire combo £260 (£306 inc VAT)