The story behind the hardware installation of the CMS ABSplus is that there is no story. You plug the drive into a USB 2.0 port, the bright-blue light comes on, and an 80GB drive appears—the drive is powered from the USB port. Installation is simply plug-and-play under Windows XP and 2000, and CMS provides drivers for Windows 98 systems. The ABSplus is one of the smaller drives we tested, measuring 1.1 by 5.0 by 3.0 inches and weighing only 7 ounces—smaller than some cell phones.

The ABSplus comes with BounceBack Professional backup software, which installs easily from the CD-ROM. BounceBack includes a disaster recovery feature; this allows you to recuperate from hard drive failures if your system's BIOS permits booting from the USB drive, as most modern machines do.

BounceBack Professional automatically partitions the ABSplus to match the partition table on your hard drive, so it can restore logical drives as well as your main C: drive. Although there is less need to partition drives these days, we found the automatic partitioning a welcome convenience. BounceBack does not compress your files, so you can read and write them with everyday applications and utilities. But that also means that 80GB is the limit of what you can back up.

At $399, the CMS ABSplus is a very good value per gigabyte; it was, however, the slowest of the portable disk-based drives in the roundup. Of course, backup is seldom a time-critical activity. What's much more important is for the backup to be there when you need it, and the provided software is definitely up to the task.