The Portable Hard Drive

The portable hard drive is a higher capacity variant of the flash drive. Although this device is somewhat larger than the flash drive, this device is still convenient to take to businesses and to transfer large amounts of data. Shape vary and are based on USB; the USB cord is retractable in some for increased portability. The most common are those based on MicroDrives. They aren't much larger than the drive they contain, and often have retractable USB plugs. They are meant to have the same practicality and ease of use of flash drives (Mass Storage Class drivers and portability), but they are still based on an actual (albeit micro-sized) hard disk with moving heads and spinning platters, so they are much less tolerant of abuse.