Digitalway HS100 Mobile 1.5 GB USB 2.0 Keychain Drive

by Digitalway

Product Details

• Item Weight: 2.1 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00011CNYE
• Item model number: HS 100
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 16, 2003

Product Description

Plug and play! Carry large data wherever you go. HS100 is a moderately priced mobile digital audio and video consumer product from Digitalway. HS100 is a 1.5 GB portable USB Mass Storage installed with 1-inch hard drive. It is a combination of large capacity hard drive and small flash memory storage device. It is capable of fast data transmission by using the USB 2.0 Interface.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Huge capacity, cheap, what more could you want?, April 27, 2004

By 

Stephan T. Ahonen (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Digitalway HS100 Mobile 1.5 GB USB 2.0 Keychain Drive (Personal Computers)

I've always liked the idea of these tiny USB storage devices. A convenient way to lug around tons of data. Boo-yah.

Traditionally, USB storage is in the form of Flash-ROM, which usually runs about $.25 per megabyte. This product, however, takes advantage of the cost-effectiveness of magnetic media and instead uses a tiny one-inch hard drive, bringing the price down to about $.10 per megabyte. That's what made it catch my eye when I was looking for a huge USB drive for myself. Other drives in this capacity range are about $300.

The drive arrived in some rather bulky packaging that appeared to be designed to be resistant to nuclear weaponry. Get out the scissors.

It came with a soft case, in which you can carry the drive and the included 5-foot USB extension cable (for those hard-to-reach USB ports). Also included was a wallet-sized CD with drivers for Windows 98 and encryption and portable email utilities. The CD does not fit very well in the case, you'll have to find another way to take it along if you're expecting to use the drive with a Win98 machine.

It also came with a lanyard, so you can hang 1.5 GB around your neck in style. My attempts to use it looked rather silly. I ended up keeping the drive in my pocket.

Now the drive itself... First off, a warning. Most USB flash storage uses 1024 bytes/kilobyte, 1024 kb/mb etc, in other words, binary units. The tradition with hard drives is to label the capacity using decimal units, leading to the familiar disclaimer, "1GB = One billion bytes." This disclaimer is conspicuously absent from both the Amazon product page and the product packaging, so I'm letting you know here. The actual capacity of the drive is 1.36 binary gigabytes. That's still pretty huge, but not as much as advertized. The shape is a bit wider than a standard flash drive since it has to have a hard drive in it, but this does not affect its portability. It seems rugged enough, I've jogged to work from a parking lot a mile away with it in my pocket, and given it a static electricity shock and it still works. As with any electronic device, however, you shouldn't put too much stress on it. Don't open it, as hard drives are extremely sensitive to dust.

Use is straightforward. Plug it in. If using Win98, install drivers from the CD. Blammo, it appears as an extra hard drive. Fill it with stuff. On the Dell computers at my work, a rather amusing Dell-logoed dialog box will pop up occasionally warning me that the number of hard drives on my system has increased/decreased, depending on whether the device is plugged in or unplugged.

Performance testing:
The music test. I filled it with about 700 MB of music and a small media player for some listening at work. The audio will skip occasionally with a one-second buffer, but increasing the buffer time to two seconds or more fixes it. The drive seems to have a higher latency than a regular hard drive, so don't try and do anything that should be real-time on it. Windows Media Player doesn't have a buffer size setting as far as I can tell, you'll just have to use a different player such as WinAmp or Foobar2000 (a great minimalist player that I use).

The gaming test. I loaded a ton of my favorite old LucasArts games on it. I have 10 games on there now, including a few full talkies. It really is amazing how much I can fit on this thing. The games work wonderfully, though due to the aforementioned high latency of the drive, when the game tries to call up a sound effect it will hang for a fraction of a second while the drive loads it. Solution, copy everything over to the computer you're working at and run off of a real hard drive. The USB drive isn't designed to really handle demanding applications any more than any other protable media, it's really just a way to ferry data around, so I don't fault it.

Overall, I've very satisfied, being able to put my games and music collection in my pocket has made work a lot more fun. =D Bottom line, it's great, and cheaper than flash for the same capacity. Buy it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dead Man Crying, July 28, 2004

By 

Aunt Silly "Vasily" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Digitalway HS100 Mobile 1.5 GB USB 2.0 Keychain Drive (Personal Computers)

Guys, pay attention to warranty terms! This good-looking sucker had a 3 month warranty only! Apparently, what the manufacturer actually meant was service life. It lasted much longer, however, - the whole 9 months!!! And of course neither the store nor the company even wanted to talk about it...

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Will not work and tech support is nonexistent, June 9, 2004

By 

Lorna Collier (belvidere, il United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Digitalway HS100 Mobile 1.5 GB USB 2.0 Keychain Drive (Personal Computers)

I bought the HS100 from Best Buy at Christmas. Tried it on my son's iMac when he first got it and it mounted on the desktop. Seemed OK. Set it aside for a few months and didn't use it. Now it will not mount on the desktop for two different Macs (OS X). Nor will it install or load on our Dell PC (WinXP). Tried calling tech support; couldn't get through for a long time, finally made contact with a person, who had such a heavy accent I could barely understand her. She took my phone number and promised I'd get a call back. Haven't heard from anyone and it's been a week. Also emailed their tech support dept twice, with zero response. This was a $175 purchase that has basically never been used (other than checking it one time). It only carries a 90 day warranty, so I can't claim warranty repairs. If you do buy this, the extended warranty probably is a good bet, though good luck getting Digitalway to honor it (if you can even get them to answer the phone). I'm highly disgusted with this company and this product!!