When I first held the Freecom XS box in my hands, it was just a hard drive to me. I knew how valuable hard drives were as mine was the one thing that saved me when my laptop crashed. I love hard drives, but they’ve not very interesting, are they? I then pulled the XS out of its box. It was smaller than I expected and covered in some sort of rubber coating. I did briefly attempt to pull the cover off, but thankfully commonsense stopped me before I did any damage. ‘How cute,’ I thought. ‘But does it work?’ Of course it does, and brilliantly too.

The Freecom XS is smaller than a DVD cover, but twice as thick. Despite its small size it’s not light! I compared the weight to my half-filled Eco Kettle and it was a good match. The rubber texture is lovely in the hand, but what is it for? There are three very good reasons actually; It’s easier to hold rubber than a slick metal surface, it will protect the XS over time from knocks, bumps and external vibrations, and it will make it easier to transport the XS in handbags and briefcases.

Hard drives aren’t particularly hard to set up. Mostly they walk you through the first stages, and then you go away and let them get on with being sensible. The Freecom XS was much the same, only it was faster! Why that surprised me I have no idea. Alex had been very impressed when she read the specs, I obviously hadn’t been paying attention. After watching it zip through a backup and picking my jaw up off the ground, it occurred to me that I perhaps I should read the specs.

Well. All of a sudden I didn’t feel quite so loving towards my own hard drive.

Data transfer from your computer to the XS is measured in GB for this little device, whereas most hard drives (like mine) measure in MB. This means that the XS is possibly 10X faster than whatever it is you have at home, unless you are a geek and already understand this stuff. For the non-geeks among us, this means the XS could potentially allow you to move 5,000 photo’s from your laptop to your hard drive per second. That’s faster than I can finish a chocolate bar and therefore truly impressive. The only thing that could slow this baby down is your computer itself. The XS will do its best work when combined with a USB 3.0 computer. If yours is slightly older than brand new, you probably have a USB 2.0 as they have dominated the market since 2001.

Aside from the phenomenal speeds, the XS memory capacity is huge. Potentially you could have enough cupboard space to store 400,000 music tracks or 1.3 million photos. That could be every piece of music you’ve ever heard, or every photo you’ve ever been in throughout your entire life! Time to take up photography perhaps? On top of all that, the XS is impossibly quiet. The tap dripping in the next room makes more noise than the XS doing a backup. If silence scares you then perhaps you could play one of your many music tracks to cover it.

The Freecom XS is tiny, powerful, very fast and oddly sexy in its rubber outfit. The only thing that bothers me is the weight. I imagine my handbag straps would complain loudly if forced to carry that, then again you can’t have everything you want.

Prices start at £119.99 for the 1TB drive on the Freecom website. The drive is also available in 1.5 and 2TB capacities.