Product Reviews

LaCie has been busy updating pretty much everything in its extensive line of storage products. The latest product to get a makeover is its portable PocketDrive CD-RW.

Although the PocketDrive is designed with portability in mind, you'd need big pockets, as it's around 15cm square and 2.5cm thick. But it will fit neatly into a carrying case with an iBook or PowerBook.

Like LaCie's other portable products, the PocketDrive is solidly built, with a strong rubber trim around the edges. It's designed for mobility and will come in handy for people whose work regularly involves travel.

The PocketDrive is equipped with both USB and FireWire interfaces, but Mac users should use the FireWire interface if they can. FireWire is far faster than USB and will allow the PocketDrive to run at its full speed, which is 24x10x24 (write/rewrite/read). The FireWire cable can also provide power for the drive, allowing you to leave the separate power cable at home. The only problem is that the PocketDrive will drain a laptop's batteries pretty quickly. You should be able to create one or two CDs without running your battery down, but you'll probably need to have your laptop plugged into a mains power supply if you want to do more than that.

Time penalty

If you've got an older Mac that doesn't have FireWire, you can still connect the PocketDrive to a USB interface, but this does have a number of drawbacks. The drive has a USB 2.0 interface, which runs at about the same speed as FireWire, but Macs are currently only equipped with the much slower USB 1.1 interface. This will still work with the PocketDrive, as the connectors are physically identical, but the

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drive will be held back to USB 1.1 performance levels, which means that it will only run at about 4x4x4.

The other drawback is that the USB interface can't provide power, so you'll need to use the PocketDrive's power supply. This isn't all that big, but it's one extra lump of plastic that you'll have to carry about.

The PocketDrive is more expensive than most conventional CD-RW drives, and you could buy a faster desktop drive, such as LaCie's oddly named U&I drive, for about £50 less. However, the PocketDrive is all about portability and on that score we can't really fault it.

We do, however, have a few complaints about the documentation and bundled software. For starters, there isn't a proper printed manual, only an electronic manual in Acrobat PDF format. And tucked in the depths of this manual is some small-print that tells you the bundled software is pretty much irrelevant.

The PocketDrive comes bundled with a cut-down version of Toast 5.1.3. Toast is the best CD creation software available for the Mac, but this version is out of date and isn't compatible with Mac OS X. There's a note in the manual that says to look for an update on Roxio's Web site, but there is no free upgrade to the OS X-compatible Toast Titanium.

Fortunately, the PocketDrive will work with the CD-burning software that is built into OS X. This isn't as versatile as Toast, though, and also means that OS X users are paying almost £250 for a drive that has no useable bundled software, which seems a bit mean.

Burnt offerings

There are also problems if you're using Toast 5.1.3 with Mac OS 8.6 or Mac OS 9. This version of Toast is incompatible with iTunes and the CD burning software in OS 9, which means you can't use iTunes to burn songs on to the PocketDrive. There is a way round this, but it involves mucking about with various extensions in your System Folder. A far simpler solution would be for LaCie to provide a more recent version of Toast, as all these compatibility problems have long since been resolved.

LaCie really needs to sort out its Mac support for the PocketDrive. But if you need a compact, portable CD-RW, and you're happy to use Apple's own CD-burning software, the PocketDrive CD-RW could come in very handy.