LaCie USB Pocket Floppy 4x

Since Apple killed the floppy, have you found yourself living with zombies? Your PC friends keep sending you floppy disks, and you still have old backups you should transfer to another medium. The LaCie USB Pocket Floppy 4x is a sleek, portable drive that can give your floppies one last gasp.

As LaCie claims, the drive is four times faster than a conventional floppy drive. We copied a 1MB file to it in 15 seconds, or at 8.5 Mbps. On a regular external USB floppy drive, the file took a whole minute to transfer.

But the Pocket Floppy has limitations. It doesn't support auto-eject, so you can't install most applications from a set of multiple floppies. It also doesn't work with the Sleep function. If your system goes to sleep while a floppy is mounted on the desktop and you wake it up, you'll get an error message stating that the disk was not put away properly and that you may have suffered data loss. So disable Sleep when using the Pocket Floppy.

The drive pulls power from the USB port, so you must plug it directly into your computer or a powered hub. It won't work if it's plugged into a USB keyboard.

Macworld's Buying Advice

For about the same price as a conventional floppy drive, the Pocket Floppy gives you better performance. If you still work with floppies and need an external drive, the LaCie USB Pocket Floppy 4x is an attractive choice.