Home > Consumer Reviews > HP PD1600 Pocket Media Drive 160 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive

This little drive is a must have addition to your HP computer. Even as a small external drive, it is wonderful. You can carry photos or music from one computer to the next with no software to load. Very versitle, and functional addition to your computer.

First let's get some technical details out of the way that were unclear to me before I purchased this drive. 1: It works with Macs perfectly after a quick formatting with Disk Utility which comes with Mac OS X. 2: The supplied USB cord is "Y" shaped and has two USB plugs at the computer end. The second plug is only needed if your machine lacks USB 2 in which case a second port is used for additional power to the drive. I'm not sure how to tell if a given port is USB 1 or 2 as they look identical to me, but I can use the drive with both my 4 year old PowerBook and my new MacBook Pro using only a single port. 3: The drive has no power cord. It is powered solely by the USB cable (very cool).

Included with the drive is a nice black padded "wallet" case within which the drive can remain while in use. The case has enough extra room to store the included USB cable. The drive is a great price and seems very well made. It is (importantly for some) plenty stylish enough to be seen next to a Mac!

I recently purchased a new HP Pavilion and noticed the two media drive bays, one for the "pocket" drive and the other for the "personal". In the interest of upgrading my backup options, I bought one of each. As the name implies, the pocket drive's form factor is smaller...by approximately half, I'd say. It plugs straight in to a port on the front of the Pavilion and is recognized in short order by Windows Vista. On the front panel, a blue LED lights up and flickers away during data transfer.

I'm using this with the GoodSync Pro utility to keep all of my files backed up. What can I really say, other than to praise the great design and functional excellence of a high quality product. The folks at HP really did a nice job with this drive. If you need an onsite external drive backup solution, I'd recommend this as ideal for the job. If you need more storage space, the personal drive version provides 500GB and 750GB options.

Of course, these drives will work equally well on non-HP PCs...you just won't have the convenient port built-in to the computer chassis. But the included USB cable will allow you to connect to any compatible system.

Simply put, the HP Pocket Media Drive is like carrying your computers' hard drive around with you versus carrying a one or two GB flash drive. The advantage comes with knowing you can download or upload whatever your heart desires since you have the available disk space in order to do so. As well, the size of the product is exactly as the description suggests (e.g., it will fit in your pocket if you do not like storing it in your laptop computers' case. The price is very competitive over the Internet - a place where I suggest you purchase the product. All-in-all, the product comes with: 1) carrying case, 2) hp pocket media drive, 3) USB Cable, and 4)set up instructions. BTW, item numbers two through four all fit in item number one (carrying case). Well, I had to have this product since I own a HP computer with the hp pocket media drive bay.

I purchased this product for my HP m9000t multimedia computer to keep all my music and photos separate from my main hard drive. It's small and portable and can be used on any computer that has a USB port (needs two USB 1.0 ports or one 2.0 port). The pocket media drive bay on my computer is a nice touch. So far, so good.

Will be buying the 750GB HP Personal Media Drive for backups.