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Mountain’s pocket sized mass storageA company called Mountain Solutions has announced an interesting pocket-sized portable hard disk drive, it calls ABSplus (ABS stands for Automatic Backup System) that could be ideal, not only for backing up a laptop hard drive, but also for storing precious digital photos.Using a 2.5 inch hard drive unit, which is the same form factor used by most notebook PCs these days, Mountain claims its top model can hold as much as 48GB of data. The clever idea behind ABSplus is that it stores a facsimile of your laptop’s hard drive. In the event of a failure of the laptop’s hard drive, you simply remove the dead drive and replace it with the drive inside the ABSplus unit. In the last year, yours truly has experienced two hard drive failures in two different laptops, including one machine that was barely six months old.An optional PCMCIA to USB adapter is also available so you can copy the ABSplus drive’s contents to a desktop machine. Each time you connect the ABSplus unit to your laptop it automatically seeks out and backs up new files. Data transfer is claimed to be 75MB per minute. It’s also possible to selectively copy folders and files.The entry-level unit, priced Ј249 + VAT, has a 6GB capacity. The 48GB version is priced Ј649 +VAT. www.mountainsolutions.com[Back to top of the page]