In times where amounts of data are continuously increasing, there's no single answer to how one can keep this data portable. Some people favour solutions such as Iomega's ZIP, JAZ or Castlewood's Orb drive . Others prefer to rely on recordable CDs or CD-RWs.

We reviewed several IDE and SCSI hard drives in the past months. This article will look at two portable data storage solutions. The first is Flotec's Pockey Drive, which consists of a standard 2.5" IDE hard drive built into a nice case with a USB connection. With a capacity of 6 GB, it holds much more data than the second storage device that we tested, which was Trek's ThumbDrive. The Thumb Drive is based on Flash technology and is available with capacities between 8 and 256 MB (they sent us the 128 MB version). As you might have guessed from the name, it's as big as a thumb. While the Pockey drive can be easily used to store and transport large amounts of data, the ThumbDrive is more suitable for people who always want to carry their projetct data around with them.