Portable Notebook Hard Drive

Notebook
owners looking for storage space that can easily fit in a shirt pocket will find
this device interesting. This is a PCMCIA card that has 260 MB of storage space
on it. Made by Calluna Technology, it fits into a notebook like any ordinary PCM
CIA card. The best part is that you don’t need any drivers for it. It gets
recognized as a PCMCIA IDE/ATAP Controller the moment you plug it into a laptop.
We checked it out with Win 98 loaded on the notebook.

Once recognized, the card is automatically assigned a drive
letter, just like an ordinary hard drive. After that you just have to format it
and it’s ready for action. Transfer rates given by the drive are also pretty
decent. We transferred a 112 MB MPG file from the drive to the notebook’s
desktop, and it took just 90 sec, which translates to a transfer rate of 1.24
Mbps. The reverse transfer from the notebook’s desktop to this drive was also
nearly the same. This transfer rate, of course, is nothing compared to that
achieved by an ordinary hard drive.

Being a handy card to have, it also comes at a premium. The
card costs approximately Rs 19,500, which is quite high, considering that it’s
only 260 MB of storage space. However, considering that it’s so compact,
portable, and doesn’t require any additional accessories like a power supply
or drivers, the drive can be a useful thing to have.

The drive has decent transfer rates and  (Rs 19,500, Graffiti Infotec, New Delhi,
Tel: 11-6472648/49, E-mail: graffiti_india@usa.net) takes about 90 sec to transfer a
112 MB MPG file on to the notebook’s desktop

Anil Chopra in Bangalore