It is very quiet. Reasonably fast. I moved 250gb on to it, went out to do some shopping, came back, done. It won't fit in a pocket but it can easily be carried in one hand. It is a hard drive so I probably wouldn't want to take it on the road with me or drop it but that is not what I bought it for. I use dvd's for more long term backup storage. I use this for secondary storage I can get to easily. 1gb storage is around 250 dvd's. I'd rather search a 1gb hd for that 5 year old file than 250 dvd's. But I wouldn't trust any hard drive to be my only copy of a mission critical file.