Pocket hard drive

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A pocket hard drive is a high capacity alternative to flash drives. Pocket hard drives couple traditional hard disk storage (allowing increased capacity over some flash drives) with convenient size and USB connections. Although these devices are somewhat larger than flash drives, they are still convenient for storing and transferring large amounts of data. Pocket hard drives usually have a capacity of 4-8 Gigabytes.

A Seagate Pocket hard drive with USB cable extended next to a 2 GB CompactFlash card. The model depicted has a 6 GB capacity.

Pocket hard drives are slightly larger than USB thumb drives. They show up as USB Mass Storage Class devices, whose drivers are built into most modern computer operating systems.

Some pocket hard drives are built from a CF hard disk and a USB CompactFlash writer.^[1]

[edit] Advantages

Pocket hard drives typically last much more cycles than Flash drives.^{[citation needed]} Flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before failure. Pocket Hard Drives can be a better option if one is planning to run software from a portable USB drive.

[edit] Disadvantages

Unlike flash drives and card storage, pocket hard drives retain the platter(s) and moving head(s) of traditional hard drives. Because of these moving parts, pocket hard drives are much less tolerant of abuse than flash-based technology, including Secure Digital cards, CompactFlash and thumb drives.