Mass storage to go - Hardware Review - Kingston Technology's Data Traveler hard drive - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1994 by Russell Letson

Rating: ***

Data Traveler

List Price: $585 (127MB), $665 (209MB)

Average Street Price: $525, $610

Manufacturer: Kingston Technology, (714) 435-2600, (800) 835-6575

WIN / DOS

Kingston's Data Traveler is a portable, removable hard-disk drive for desktop and laptop computers. What the Data Traveler lacks in scorching speed, it makes up for in convenience and portability. Say your laptop's hard-disk space is limited, but you're going on a long trip and need to work with the same tools and data you use in the office--with the Data Traveler, you can easily take much, if not all, of your desktop work environment with you.

The disk proper (available in 127MB and 209MB configurations) resides in a three-by-five-by-one-inch carrier that plugs into a base unit, which in turn can be snapped into a rechargeable battery pack. There should also be a docking module in the near future that allows the drive carrier to be plugged directly into a desktop computer. We attached the drive to its host computer via a parallel port--access to a printer was maintained by feed-through ports on the adapter. Driver software loaded at boot-up identified the Data Traveler to DOS, assigned it a drive letter, and directed data intended for it to the parallel port; thereafter the Traveler appeared to applications as a normal hard drive. You may have to play around a bit to find the optimal position for its driver, which tends to be a bit fussy about where and when it's loaded--it won't work from high memory, and it likes to be near the top of the CONFIG.SYS file--but apart from that it's well behaved once it's been established.

The parallel connection the Data Traveler uses means that performance varies with the speed of the host system's processor, and Kingston's technical people are quick to point out that by running it through a bidirectional or highspeed parallel port, faster speeds may be attained. In practice, applications as disk intensive as Quattro Pro ran acceptably on the Data Traveler paired with a 20-MHz 386SX laptop. And things went noticeably faster when we switched to a 33-MHz 386DX desktop machine.

You can even change environments on the fly by Quick-Swapping disks while powered up--but be sure you run the park utility included with the drive to make certain that files are closed and buffers are emptied, then pull the disk carrier out of the base and plug in another one. This is useful if, for example, you're working in an image-editing application and using several different graphic files that take up a lot of disk space.

The Data Traveler works well as a portable mass storage solution, but at 7.5 by 3.25 by 2.75 inches for the drive, base, and battery, it's not exactly petite, and the power transformer is the size (and nearly the weight) of a half brick. It can also be a bit awkward in tight quarters: The data cable is not removable, and the parallel port adapter projects more than five inches from the back of the host computer. It's quite feasible that you can carry the unit on a plane, but forget about running this system on your tray table. For situations with a reasonable amount of work surface, however, the Data Traveler offers a workable way of adding a good-size block of removable mass storage to just about any DOS-based computer.