Hard disk drives are one of the slowest computer components in the industry today. Due to their mechanics, they have not been able to keep up with other constantly updated technologies such as GPUs, CPUs, and chipsets. All storage manufacturers are mainly doing is increasing rotational speeds for platters, which lead to better I/O performance, switching standards (PATA to SATA for desktop hard disk drives), and integrating on-board cache (2MB à 8MB à 16MB) depending upon the generation of drives. The differences we just listed are all for performance gains, however, physically storage manufacturers are developing hard drives that are both smaller in size and larger in capacity. Until this year, 400GB of space on a single hard disk drive was unheard of, but it quickly changed with Hitachi’s announcement. The hard disk drive aspects we listed above are only few of the major improvements that manufacturers have done to keep the drives with latest industry standards and growth. Of course, they have made changes to platter density and whatnot for larger sized hard drives, but it is nothing significant to consider the hard disk drive storage industry evolutionary.

There seems to be barrier when it comes to mechanics of a hard drive and it is apparent that leading storage manufacturers such as Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate haven’t done anything to crash that barrier. This is why the storage market is sometimes unexciting in the realm of latest GPUs, CPUs, and chipsets. Even now, everyone is predicting the introduction of SATA II standard, but what about the hard drives themselves. Will we see any breakthrough by the time SATA II is introduced to the masses? We certainly hope so.

While internal hard drives are at their peak, external drives are getting higher in capacity and performing even better with Firewire and USB 2.0 standards. It was not long ago when USB Flash drives were the major breakthrough, optioning capacity from 32MB to 2GB, but that has changed in a swish, thanks to Transcend and other external drive manufacturers.

Many users simply portray external drives as something that is easy to move, back-up data on, and access. While they use USB flash drives for carrying files and pictures, they sometimes wish for larger capacity than the expensive 2GB models. Transcend enters the market with answers to your wishes. Their StoreJet 2.5" hard drive is portable, sleek, and comes in two capacities – 20GB and 40GB. This should keep even the storage enthusiast pleased for sometime. It seems that external hard drives will slowly take over CD-R/DVD-R media. You can hold your entire collection of music albums and store high-quality images in the palm of your hands. Simply plug-in the drive, drag-n-drop the files, and you are set to go. Everything is hassle-free.

Transcend offers four varieties of portable hard drives. First one, PhotoBank, is designed to carry thousands of photos. Next in line, they have their StoreJet series – StoreJet 1.8" and 2.5". And lastly, Transcend offers Combo 2.5" disk drive. All four of these drives come in two flavors – 20GB and 40GB, which sound excellent for drives, this size. And for those who may be interested in lower capacity models, StoreJet 2.5" and Combo 2.5" come in 0GB models as well. We are assuming that these particular models have space less than 1,000MB.

Our goal is to evaluate all four of these drives and bring results to you as soon as possible, but for now, let’s take an in-depth look at Transcend’s StoreJet 2.5" portable hard disk drive…

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