The mSSD from Freecom is a fantastically small and lightweight SSD drive that comes in a 128GB or 256GB capacity. One of the benefits of a drive so small is that it fits easily in a shirt pocket and, because it is so light (29g), you’ll hardly notice that it’s there. It also comes with a USB 3.0 interface so that file transfers are a speedy at 5Gbp/s (as opposed to USB 2.0’s 480Mp/s spec). As you would expect, the drive is powered off of your computer’s USB port.
I bought the Freecom mSSD, because I found myself constantly fighting the battle of the bulge with iTunes on my laptop. Being a fan of many TV shows, podcasts and music meant that I was always running out of space (my laptop is a MacBook with a 750GB SSD). I thought about purchasing a regular external hard drive, but there were a number of reasons to go with this SSD instead.
The price was not exorbitant for what you get. I purchased it from Amazon.co.uk for £158. That’s about a £30 premium to other external portable SSD drives from Samsung and Transcend, but this drive is almost 1/3 of their size. I thought the reduced form-factor was worth the extra money.
Size matters to me, because I like to keep all my most important cables and accessories in a small zip-up bag and this easily fit into it. Also, when I listen or watch iTunes content off my laptop, I tend to be perched in an airplane seat, or some other restricted place, and like a drive that is small and light enough to put onto the laptop keyboard without having a tethered drive hanging off to the side, or actually in my lap. As you can see from the photo, this drive isn’t much larger, or thicker, than a small lighter.
Another reason I wanted to go with SSD was that there are times when – in a pinch – I like to dump files from my camera while I’m on the road and I’d prefer to put them on a medium that’s safer than HHD, until I can properly back them up in several places when I return. Generally speaking, I keep three back-ups of important data like this: one in the Cloud, one on an HHD, and one on a RAID array.
I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am very happy with the transfer speed for files that I use in iTunes. I haven’t used it as a back-up my laptop, so it would be interesting to see how much slower it would be than my portable HHD for that purpose. I must say, though, that the device does run very hot when transferring large amounts of data back and forth, so you don’t want to put this on your leg while using it.
Sadly, this product does not seem to be available in America. Click here for more info from the manufacturer.
For American buyers, check out the Oyen Shadow Mini, which is close in size and goes up to 1TB.
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