I have a laptop. Harry wants me to bring it to work everyday. He gave me a backpack to make it easier. It's still heavy. The Shark 250 from Avatar (Milpitas, CA 408-321-0110) changed all that. It's a portable hard drive with 250 MB removable disks. The disks are actual hard disks like a hard drive.
When I first heard about the Shark 250, I didn't believe it. I wanted to know how to get the speed of a hard disk in a small portable 3 1/2" form factor drive that weighs 10 ounces. That's smaller and lighter than a 3 1/2" optical drive.
The drive is marketed as an extension to your laptop. It comes with free Web-related software like McAfee's WebScan and DocuMagix's HotPagePlus. The idea is to download Web pages to the 250 MB disks without gobbling up your hard drive space. Web pages and sites are always changing. Hard disks are rewritable.
There are lots of imaging uses for this product like storing digital photographs. Download your digital images to the removable hard disks. Take the disks and the Shark 250 and plug it into another computer system at another location. Store different multimedia business presentations on different disks. No one needs to know what goodies you have on your laptop when you give a presentation.
The Shark 250 plugs into your computer and laptop. The ideal scenario is to have a Shark 250 at work and home. When I burn the midnight oil at home I bring the lightweight (a few ounces) media into work instead of my bulky laptop.
I've been using the Shark 250 for a couple of months. I'm using it on a Fujitsu (San Jose, CA 408-432-6333) Monte Carlo laptop. I also have it installed on PCs running Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 at work. The software works on both systems. The laptop wasn't as fortunate. On some laptops, mine included, the Shark 250 needs more power to work. The Shark 250 connects but you can't get the data. That's a problem.
Avatar had a solution. An adapter. Plug one end of the adapter into the pass-through port and the other end into a wall outlet. The drive works. But there's a problem. The portable solution that you plug into the wall isn't that portable.
They had another solution for laptop users. An $80 PC card. You know it as a PCMCIA card. This takes care of the power supply problem. I saw it at PC Expo. Brought my laptop and Shark 250 with me. I thought it would be nice to work at the show.
I had trouble connecting the PC card. The system recognized the driver for the PC card. That's nice. It didn't recognize the drive. My documents were lost on the disc. Technically, the documents were there. I just couldn't get to them. That's a problem.
After a few attempts to decipher the mystery, product manager Alan Stoddard deleted the Avatar card from the registry. He did this by going to Run on the Start menu and typing regedit. Don't do this if you're not sure what you're doing. You could mess up things that are working fine. Have technical support on the line to talk you through it. They're a big help!
Next, we stopped the PC card. Ejected it from the slot and reinserted the card. The dialogue box popped up. Pick the Windows 95 default driver. There are other options. I picked the wrong one. Choose the first one. Or else you're going to have trouble. The system may not recognize the drive. Then you can't get to your data stored on the removable disks.
Avatar's technical support is well aware of this problem. There's a piece of paper in the package warning you about this. Read it! It tells you how to avoid this situation.
I wrote half of this review using the PC card connection at Avatar's booth. The Fujitsu laptop has a long battery life. Now the Shark 250 is truly portable. I like that. It also works at the office. I plugged in the Shark 250 at work and continued to work on this story.
The drive comes with one pass-through parallel port, a piece of 250 MB media and six software packages. It costs $300. There's a $50 rebate until the end of the year. The media costs $30 for a 250 MB disk. You can get an Avatar carrying case for $20. I really like this product. It's easy to use and makes a lot of sense.
Harry got a similar device for extra storage. He got the MiniPACK-PCMCIA ($250) from Techcessories (San Jose, CA 408-954-1980) and popped a spare 2.1 GB drive into it (typical cost $700). Everything in the MiniPACK-PCMCIA is portable except the 2.5" hard drive. He had to get that separately and install it.
Harry's portable hard drive solution costs $1,000. You need some know-how to install the drive into the MiniPACK-PCMCIA. The Shark 250 ($300) costs considerably less. It also doesn't limit your capacity because you can keep adding and removing disks. Storage is limitless. To install this drive, you need to read and follow directions.
Both Harry and I like the convenience and portability of these solutions . They're a great way to add more storage space to your laptop or PC.
