Micromat TechTool Protege

I service a lot of Macintosh computers. For years, I've been carrying around a portable firewire hard drive (most recent is the small 80GB Lacie one) with a firewire cable. I can easily boot off the "Tools" partition I've created on the FWHD with all my disk tools installed on it: DiskWarrior, TechTool, ProSoft Data Rescue, Etherpeek, Norton (as a last resort), and other tools. It's made my troubleshooting routines very easy.

My holy grail was to be able to create a tiny pocket-friendly bootable volume with all my tools. I've had lots of experience creating small bootable OS's to put on DVD's, so paring down the size of Mac OS X isn't too difficult. About a year ago, I discovered Kanguru's firewire-based flash HD's and asked my school to order one to play with. I wanted to try to create a bootable tools disk that uses the Kanguru firewire flash drive instead of having to carry around a larger-than-desirable firewire hard disk based volume like my current Lacie, or a SmartDisk. Unfortunately, my purchase request was turned down.

The good news is that the smart folks at Micromat had the same idea and are releasing a firewire flash disk that does exactly what I want and need. They are calling it the TechTool Protege, and it looks like they are using the Kanguru flash firewire drive just as I was going to do.

I'm filling out the purchase order form as we speak.

What's interesting is that Kanguru doesn't even list their 1GB flash drive anymore. I'm guessing Micromat bought their entire stock. Heh.
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