Carrying around an external hard drive usually means having to remember to pack the accessories: a data cable and maybe even a power adapter. But forget either one, and even the fastest hard drive will be dead in the water. With its permanently attached cable and FireWire bus-powered operation, the Aegis Portable hard drive helps keep things moving. Now you can focus on more important things, like remembering to back up your data regularly. The Apricorn Aegis Portable features a compact silver-and-black plastic enclosure about the size of a wallet. We reviewed the 80GB model, but the drive is also available in capacities ranging from 40GB to 160GB. Apricorn offers a similar model sporting a single tethered USB cable in the same capacities. The single port keeps its size down (it’s the smallest and lightest drive we’ve looked at recently), in spite of the built-in cable’s bulk.

While the 5.5-inch cable may be perfect for use when the drive is situated next to your MacBook, the drive includes a 39-inch extender cable for use when FireWire ports are harder to reach. It also comes with a protective case made of stretchy black neoprene.

The drive connects to a FireWire 400 port on your Mac using the tethered cable, which tucks neatly away and snaps into a recessed channel on the side of the case when not in use.

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For carrying less than a gig of data, a USB flash drive can’t be beat. For hundreds of gigabytes, a full size external hard drive is the way to go. Somewhere in between these two extremes is the Aegis Portable External Hard Drive. It’s size is still convenient enough to fit in a shirt pocket, but it has the serious storage capacity to haul around all the essential files, and plenty more, and even room to spare. Housed in the silver plastic case is a 2.5” notebook drive. It has 8 megs of cache, and a 5400 rpm speed. This is a better notebook drive as the cheapies have a mere 2 megs of cache, and rotate at the s-l-o-w 4200 speed. This gets housed in a plastic enclosure that weighs 5.5 oz., and measures 0.75” x 3.3” x 4.7”. The Aegis Portable External Hard Drive has the USB cable integrated into the case design, and it stows in a groove for easy transport. The silver and black case also features the requisite blue LED that glows when the hard drive is in use. The hard drive is protected in a 16 point omni-directional mounting system to protect it from any shock damage from falls.

Rounding out the package is a USB extension cable, a USB Y cable, a padded travel pouch, software on CD, and a Quickstart guide. Notice that there is no AC adaptor; we simply don’t need it as the little drive is powered off of the USB port. I also can’t resist pointing out that the drive arrives well packaged to protect it during transit.

Now, as this is a USB powered, based on a notebook drive, I wasn’t expecting any speed records here. However, it did exceed my expectations when I clocked both read and write speeds in at around 22 to 23 MB/s. This is completely respectable, and therefore you can fill its large capacity at a reasonable rate. When transferring MP3’s, I was able to write them at about a Gig per minute so only the largest collections will take more than a little while. By way of comparison, my Western Digital 120 GB external hard drive, which runs off of AC power, and is based on a 3.5″ desktop drive only musters a read speed of 14.2 MB/s so the little Aegis Portable is certainly no slouch. In terms of real world correlation, this means that I was able to play MP3’s and compressed video files from the Aegis Portable without any hiccups whatsoever.

In my mind, this Aegis Portable External Hard drive is ideal for the road warrior that wants, no make that needs, to have serious storage capacity in a transportable format. It’s also great for toting around a lot of MP3’s, images, and video files. This is all backed up by a three year warranty.

The Aegis Portable is a 2.5” external hard drive and backup system for both PC and Mac notebooks, available with either USB or FireWire interfaces. Value: Backing up files with the Aegis Portable saves workers and the IT department valuable time recovering lost data if a computer fails or a laptop is stolen, not to mention revenue that would have been generated by that mobile worker if they could not access their valuable information. Target User: The perfect mobile workforce companion for travel between home and office, as a backup device for a notebook, or for extra portable storage.