NETHERLANDS-BASED computer company Freecom claims the mantel of world’s smallest 2.5-inch external hard drive, the XXS.

The outfit reckons the XXS is 27 per cent smaller than its rivals’ offerings, measuring just 109.8 x 79.5 x 13.5 mm in overall size. The INQ was exclusively told the internal drive is of Samsung SATA in nature, which ships in 160, 250 and 320GB capacities. Natively the HDDs are only 100 x 69.85 x 9.5 mm, which means the form-fitting rubber sleeve will need to fit like a heat-dispensing fetishist glove to really work.

Freecom Mobile Drive XXS

Connections on board are of USB 2.0 flavour, which also is where the power’s derived from. Although the accompanying literature apparently states it is 1.1 compatible. This is a puzzlement for us, as we have no idea where the drives' running power will be drawn from if that is the case.

With regard to Freecom's competitors, Iomega's Ego comes in at 133 x 80.9 x 19 mm and WD's passport measures 126.2 x 79.5 x 15 mm. By Freecom's reckoning, these are 73 per cent and 27 per cent greater in volume than the XXS. In checking their maths we found they were a little off base with the Iomega stats, in actual fact it’s 134 x 89 x 19 mm in dimensions.

Just a quick note on the weight seeing as we are talking about pocket-sized portable drives and it is at the heart of the matter. The Ego comes in at 220grams for the 320GB, Western Digital 180grams and the XXS a meagre 115. Just to put this in relative terms, the internal drives weight is 109grams, showing you how very small its enclosure is. As for the robustness, that’s another matter. Seeing as they’ve already made the comparisons against the vendors above, we’ll run a comparative review at a later date.

Through some deft investigation, we discovered there are external vanilla cases that come close in size to this mobile drive. We found that this one from Cool Drives coming in under the radar in most dimensions just not in length – it was slightly over there. Also this one by Smart Disks is a smidgen over in everything but there are plenty more around.

In laymen’s terms, it’s a little shorter than the new Iphone, slightly wider and a little bit deeper. Also it’s much cheaper, you won’t have sold your soul to the fruit company just for a phone and with the top model you’ll get 302 gigabytes more of storage.

Prices for the 160, 250, and 320GB Freecom mobile drives are £45/€70, £60/€90 and £80/€100 respectively, they’ll be around in the next few weeks.

With the cheapest findings for the Samsung HM320JI 320GB HDD being only £65, tacking on a few extra quid for a tried and tested caddy can’t be all that bad until large capacity SSDs become affordable µ