by Tony Bradley, PCWorld  

Editor's Note: The following article is reprinted from the Net Work blog at PCWorld.com.

Portable hard drives are great tools for expanding the storage capacity of laptops and mobile devices or for sharing data with others, but you sacrifice speed for portability. Other World Computing (OWC) has a new series of super-fast eSATA 6G drives that change that.

According to OWC, the Mercury Elite Pro mini is the industry’s first eSATA 6G and bus-powered USB 3.0 portable storage device. The eSATA 6G drives are capable of transferring data at rates comparable to internal hard drives, so you can work with a portable storage device without sacrificing performance.

The drives are bus-powered, pulling their juice from a USB connection, so they don’t require a separate AC adapter. That makes it easier and more convenient for mobile users to take advantage of the expanded storage capacity on the go.

The Mercury Elite Pro mini drives come in stylish, aircraft-grade brushed aluminum enclosures. You can choose between 2.5-inch SATA or SSD models. No matter which type of drive is inside, the Mercury Elite Pro drives are fanless, for quiet operation.

With the move toward ultrabooks and SSD drives, data storage on mobile computers is getting faster and more reliable, but the capacity is decreasing. Many notebooks now come equipped with 500GB or even 1TB of storage standard, but ultrabooks are more likely to be built with 128GB SSDs.

Your mileage will vary, but 128GB of data fills up pretty quick. Portable drives that can offer a cost-effective means of expanding storage capacity, without requiring separate external power or sacrificing performance, will be welcome by many mobile users.

The new OWC drives come in 13 different Mac- and PC-compatible configurations starting at $115. They are available in both 7200 RPM hard drive and SSD variations with capacities up to 1.5TB.