Product Reviews

Most of the portable hard disks we've seen contain 2½in disks, and tend to be around the size of a wallet. LaCie's USB Key Max uses a 1in hard disk so it's around the size of a stack of credit cards, weighs only 50g and has a capacity of 30GB. A short 1.5cm USB cable is integrated into the case but thankfully an extension cable is included.

The USB Key Max wasn't as fast as a 2in portable hard disk in our file transfer tests, but it still performed well overall. Only its slow speed of 1.37MB/s when writing small files let it down.

With a cost per gigabyte of £2.83 the Key Max is expensive compared with a 2in portable hard disk. It is £20 cheaper than OCZ's 32GB ATV flash drive, so it's a good alternative to high-capacity USB flash drives.