By Jerry Pournelle

December 5, 2005

(More Christmas Chaos

Column 303 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Seagate External Drives

This is Chaos Manor, and our methods are sometimes, well, chaotic, particularly this time of year when we are making up our Christmas lists while jotting notes for the annual Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards, and the Orchid and Onion Parade. Sometimes things are just so useful, and so ubiquitous here, that we forget to list them.

That almost happened with the Seagate USB drives. These come in many sizes and flavors, and everyone loves them, and since we all use them and they Just Work we nearly forgot them. They're great gifts, and best of all, just about everyone can use another external storage drive even if they already have one or two.

The most popular Seagate external drives here are the 5 GB "Cookie," which fits in a shirt pocket and goes with you anywhere and draws its power from the USB connection—it works wonderfully with Lisabetta, my Tablet PC; the 100 GB "book" which is small enough to fit in a brief case, and uses two USB connectors, one for data and one for power; and the 400 GB which has its own wall brick power supply.

One way to use the 100 is to have a powered USB hub expander (Belkin makes some very good ones, and those are what I carry) so you're not draining your laptop.

Whatever size you get, you can be sure a Seagate USB external drive is welcome, and they are recommended.

Three sizes of Seagate external drives. They all Just Work.

APC Mobile Power: TravelPower Adapter and Universal Notebook Battery

We all know that if you use external disk drives powered through the USB port, you'll drain your laptop battery pretty fast unless it has external power. Sometimes there's no help for it; and of course it's easy enough to run out of power on an airplane.

BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005