Emprex Micro Storage 2.2GB HD Quits

I routinely used my Emprex Micro Storage 2.2 GB hard drive to not only store files I needed on the fly but to transfer files between computers. This morning while at work, I hooked up the drive to my PowerBook to transfer a Word file to my work PC, the little blue activity light on the drive flashed, but the drive did not mount. Uh-oh. It had been working fine. I moved the drive to my work PC, a Windows XP powered HP Compaq Pentium 4, and tried it there. Windows flashed a message to me that it couldn’t recognize the USB device I was trying to attach. So, I’m fairly certain that something in the little drive has died. I tried putting it back on the PowerBook and bringing up Disk Utility in a long shot attempt to salvage something, but it was to no avail. I have contacted Emprex and am not sure about the warranty or if there is anything else I can do to troubleshoot it (I doubt it).

In the meantime, I’m going to have to find something to replace it. I’m still leaning toward a small hard drive, though I may not go after a 1 inch form factor anymore. A larger 2.5 inch external drive would probably be more economical, but I have yet to go shopping to see. I might replace it with a 2 GB Flash drive, but the problems I’ve been seeing lately with those drives (see my earlier blog about the 00000000.000 files and folders) make me a bit skeptical of that route. A trip to Fry’s and/or Microcenter is in order, probably the latter because there’s a 300GB SATA hard drive I’d like to buy from MicroCenter to put in my dual G5.