Whilst browsing through ebay I happened accross some external hard disk covers you can pick up for amazingly small prices (and surprisingly high postage). By a bit of strategic bidding I managed to get an enclosure and interface for a 2.5 inch drive for just around ten quid, delivered.

The box arrived yesterday and so today I popped a 20 GB hard drive in it and fired it up. The whole thing works very well. It is powered by the USB port (in fact it connects to a couple of sockets to get the power required) and doesn't need any drivers for Windows XP. It just appears as a large hard drive.

The entire package is small and neat, and I'm going to use it to carry work and pictures around the place. If you add in the price of a drive, it means that you can have a 20GB portable storage device for comfortably less than 60 quid. USB pen drives are perhaps smaller and neater, but nothing beats the speed and capacity of a hard disk if you want to store a lot of data.