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Want a quick and simple way of transporting and transferring files? Floppy discs not big enough? Don't have a CD writer in every PC you use? Well, this may be just the thing for you.

What is it?
The Ur-Disk(tm) USB "Hard Drive" is basically some flash memory on a stick, with a USB plug on the end. It's about half the length of a normal pen but about twice as wide, and is used as a removable drive on almost any machine with a USB port. Files are simply copied or moved to and from it as with any other hard drive. It couldn't be simpler, and a real plus for the vast majority of users is that it requires no drivers to be loaded.

I bought my Ur-Disk from chuna, at PCRange through a group buy in the forums. The model on offer was the 128MB version, pretty much ideal for my intended application of transferring files between home and work.

Let's look at the specs (shamelessly paraphrased from the box).

Right, so now we've seen the marketing, lets look at the drive ....

What's in the box?
Opening the box, I found the following:
- The Ur-Disk(tm) USB Hard Drive
- A driver CD for Win98/98SE
- A USB extension cable (male/female)
- A sporty neck strap, perfect for when you want to wear your new Hard Disk to the beach

The drive is exclosed in a light plastic shell, but feels solid enough, and it really is small. Perhaps that neck strap might be handy after all, at least then I'd always know where it is ...

Usage
Installation was ummm, extremely simple. As soon as I plugged the drive into a USB port, Win2k recognised it as a mass storage device and created a new removable drive, immediately accessible through windows explorer. Note that Win98 users will need to load a driver, but all windows versions since require no driver to be loaded.

I don't have access to a Mac, so I couldn't test installation for our Apple fans.

 

One note at this point : it seems the drive requires a powered host USB port, and won't work properly through a USB hub. I tried it in one of the USB ports of a Hercules Gametheatre XP external box, with no success.

Checking the USB "Unplug or Eject Hardware" dialog, the Ur-Disk is clearly shown

and device manager also shows it as a disk drive

Pretty nifty!

So, how does it perform?

Performance
My highly technical testing regime consisted of timing how long it took to transfer a large file onto the Ur-Disk, and then back onto the system. The file I used was the Win2k SP2 executable, weighing in at beefy 101MB. This should give us a reasonable feel for the real-world raw transfer speeds of the Ur-Disk.

In an attempt to give the testing at least a flimsy facade of scientific basis, the average performance for three tests was calculated:

Transfer system -> Ur-Disk : 3m:23s = 511KB/sec
Transfer Ur-Disk -> System : 2m:15s = 765KB/sec

Ample performance for this type of device in my opinion, correlating well with the published specifications above, and indeed slightly exceeding the specified read transfer rate (although this is well within the tolerance of my testing method).

If SISoft Sandra's drive benchmark module is more your bag, I also ran the Ur-Disk through the 2001te pro version, which showed the Ur-Disk to be a bit slower than a Zip drive.

Disk activity for the Ur-Disk is shown by a small LED in the end of the unit, which is green for idle, orange for activity.

And it's that easy, nothing to it!

Final thoughts
I'm pretty impressed with the Ur-Disk. It's certainly going to make my life easier when I need to transfer data between work and home, and I'm thinking of more uses for it by the day. Recommended.

The Ur-Disk is available from PCRange.