Western Digital's 120 GB hard drive has been available for a while now, and it has been striking for its high performance. A special version with a fat 8 MB cache ensures that Western Digital currently offers the fastest hard drive . Someone in the development department must have asked, "What now?" And the answer was simple: A mobile version of this top-seller.

Essentially, the recipe is quite easy: of course, Western Digital uses a hard drive from its own production, creates snazzy casing for it, and equips it with an interface so that the IDE drive can be run with a FireWire controller (IEEE1394). The result is a mobile storage solution that offers a tremendous 120 GB of space and also has a connection that's fast enough, thanks to its bandwidth of up to 400 MBits/s.

There is indeed a demand for such fast external storage solutions: users who need to carry large quantities of data with them can hardly be satisfied with CD-Rs or DVDs; even the alternatives such as MO drives and their derivatives are stuck with only a few gigabytes. Take the administrators, for example, who need to have a multitude of programs at hand, or may need to quickly make a complete backup of the server or transfer other data.