This is one of those "meh" devices that sounds royally cool until I think about application. Sure, it's a small portable storage device with huge capacity. So it's ideal for people who want to carry large amounts of data around to a variety of PCs. Not unheard of, but how common is that? With
thumb drives as big as 1gb costing $75 or less, I'd see most people going that way (and yes, I realize it's more than 10x as expensive per gig as the HDD). Here's the thing - no matter how small the HDD is, it's not tiny. It's still an extra piece of equipment you're carrying around. Sure, it can hold 20 movies, but who travels AND watches movies on a PC? They use laptops, and if you're already carrying and setting up a laptop on your airplane tray, you don't want an extra HDD dangling off it - you'd just load the movies onto the laptop.
Similarly, it holds a ton of music, but it doesn't play it. So unless you commonly visit a lot of different PCs, you'd probably rather have either a player or else a much smaller device.
Oddly enough, I actually own an external HDD. I got it before thumb drives were either large or affordable, and I used it to hold my Outlook .pst file and shuttle it and other docs between home and work. I'd actually have a use for one of the HDDs Meal links to, but I know hardly anyone else who would. By "know," I mean know personally - not online where all the geeks are.
In any case, I think it's cool that HDDs are being miniaturized and ruggedized while still remaining affordable. I just don't see a broad market for them.
Sith
