Floppy drives are now a thing of the past or at least should be, but we still need to transfer data don’t we? CDR media is a popular alternative to floppy drives because it can hold a lot of data, and with CD burners being so fast now a days only takes minutes to burn a CD. The problem with CDRs is that you only get to use them once and cannot modify data, even if you are using CDRWs it will take a good ammount of time to do add or delete what you want, not to mention that the computer will have to have a burner and software installed. So what is there to do? You could use a Zip drive, JAZ drive, or carry around an entire hard drive but all of those options have their downfalls. There is a really cool way to solve all your problems, use a mini USB hard drive, the great thing about this device is because it’s USB no drivers are needed. You can use it on any computer, its small, and it’s fast. You can read, write, copy, delete and move data from your hard disk drive to the Ur-Disk or from the Ur-Disk to your hard disk drive. This little drive has a lot to offer, more than you would expect from something this small, but then again does size really matter? This little hard drive can transfer up to 12Mbit per second at “Full Speed” and is supports power saving mode to reduce the power consumption while using Ur-Disk in any mobile devices. Ur-Disk is supported on Windows 95 OSR2 with USB support, Windows 98, Windows 98SE with a device driver and with Windows ME, 2000, XP, Linux, Mac 9.0 or above without any device driver. The Ur-Disk also has a green power LED when the drive is plugged in and an amber one flashes when it is transferring data. Because the Ur-Disk is powered by USB bus (4.5V ~ 5.5V) you don’t need any external power which means you can install it anywhere.
Specs:
- Size: 81 x 22 x 10 mm
- Weight: 13 g
- Erase Cycles: 1,000,000 times
- Data retention time: 10 years
- Read transfer: > 880KB/second
- Write transfer: > 500KB/second
- Acoustic noise: 0 dB (at one meter)
- Shock resistance: 1000 G (maximum)
- Suspend Current: 500uA
- Operating Current: 100mA
- Operating Temperature: -10oC~ 50oC
- Storage Temperature: -15oC~ 60oC
- Support USB specification: revision 1.1
- Storage Capacity: 128MB
I opened up the box to find the black Ur-Disk and it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be but that is a good thing. The Ur-Disk is on the top of the box and all of the accessories that you get are below it. Along with the Ur-Disk you also get a CD, USB extension cable, neck strap and 2 little labels.
The Ur-Disk is very small, I put it next to a 3g tube of Arctic Silver 3 so that you could get a good idea of how small this thing really is. As you can see its basically about the same length while being much thinner and lighter. The Ur-Disk comes with a USB extension cable so that if you don’t have front USB ports you don’t have to crawl around to the back of your computer. If you don’t have front USB ports I would suggest you do the front USB mod guide that I wrote because it will make using USB much easier. The CD that comes with the Ur-Disk contains drivers incase your operating system doesn’t support it and a format utility so that you can format the drive if you don’t want to use Windows Explorer. You also get a neck strap which can be attached to the Ur-Disk and you can wear it around, I don’t know if you really want to do this but you can.
Because this little hard drive is USB it’s simple to install and requires no drivers as long as you are using one of the supported operating systems. All you need to do is plug this little drive into a USB port and let your operating system find it. I installed the drive on both a Windows 2000 and Windows 98SE machine and in both cases it installed it without me having to use any drivers and without a problem. I plugged the drive into the front USB port of my Cooler Master ATC-101 case which I will have a review of soon and installation process took about 10 seconds from when I plugged it in to when I saw the drive in windows explorer.
Both Windows 2000 and Windows 98SE recognized the drive with no drivers needed, in the device manager the drive shows up as Ur-Disk: USB Mass Storage USB Device and is under the disk drives category. To unplug the device it is best to stop it before you unplug it just to be sure that nothing is using it so you don’t lose any information you might need.
Test bed:
- Cooler Master ATC-101
- EPoX 8K3A+
- Athlon XP 1800+
- 512MB Corsair 3200
- 80GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- Sound Blaster Live! Value
- Pioneer 16x slot load DVD
- 10/100 NIC
- Floppy
To test this drive I loaded up good old SiSoft Sandra and ran the file system benchmark as you can see size doesn’t matter, this little drive beats both floppy drives and the zip drive by a lot, the JAZ drive is faster than this Ur-Disk because it is SCSI which is much faster than USB or IDE, but the JAZ drive is harder to install and less portable. I also did testing with the Ur-Disk transferring files from Windows 2000 to Windows 98SE and everything worked perfectly without a problem and transfers were very fast.
Conclusion:
This little USB hard drive can be utilized in so many ways and make things so much easier. I hate having to use floppy drives to do anything because they are so slow and they only hold 1.44MB of information which now a days is nothing. Whenever you want to transfer files they are usually much larger than a floppy can hold so you will either have to upload them somewhere and download them, burn a CD, or use some kind of other storage device. All of these things will take much longer than you really want or need to spend moving files. This Ur-Disk USB hard drive has so much to offer and there are no negative aspects to it that I can see other than the fact that because its small you could lose it but you can lose big things as well. Overall I am going to give this product a 10/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal Of Approval because it’s an awesome product. I would like to thank Media West Distribution Inc. for sending this over to review, they have a 64MB and 128MB version available. They also carry Warcraft III and were kind enough to send a copy over which I am giving away as part of the prize pack for the OCmodshop graphic design contest.
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