Before there were USB flash drives, there were external hard drives (albeit bigger) that stored up to 160GB worth of data. These drives have been becoming smaller and therefore, more popular. Today, I’m taking a look at the Aegis Mini Firewire hard drive from Apricorn.Inside the Aegis Mini is a 4200RPM 1.8″ Hitachi hard drive, which is significantly smaller than the hard drive inside your desktop or notebook computer. On the outside is a plastic casing that holds the built-in Firewire cable which is 3-4″ long. An extension cord is included if needed. A nice touch is that it is bus-powered, which means no need to worry about lugging around an extra power brick.

Now, you may be thinking - does size sacrifice speed? In this case it does. Most drives in computers these days use 7200RPM and 8MB cache drives, which spin much faster than these 1.8″ 4200RPM 2MB cache drives. In our testing, it took 2:09 (minutes:seconds) to transfer 1.7GB of data to the device, and 5 seconds to transfer 50MB of data. Which means you average around 10MB/s, plenty fast enough for toting files around. As we mentioned, 7200RPM drives are still faster and better performing.

The Aegis Mini also includes versions of backup and synchronization software in the box for both PC and Mac.

Overall, the Aegis Mini is great for porting around small files to and from work as well as backing up important documents and a considerable amount of photos and videos. The Aegis Mini is available in 30, 60, 80, and 100GB models starting at $135. A USB version is also available.

Pros

• Extremely compact and lightweight.
• Built-in FireWire cable.
• Bus-powered, no need for a power supply.

Cons

• Not the fastest for transferring files, but good enough for small documents.

Final Verdict
4.5 out of 5 stars.

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