Review: Crucial Gizmo USB Flash Drive
Ian Waugh plugs them in and plays fast and loose with his data.
| Product | Gizmo USB Flash Drive |
|---|---|
| Company | Crucial |
| Web | www.crucial.com/uk |
| Price | 1Gb £51.69 512Mb £28.19 256Mb £17.61 128Mb £10.56 |
| We like | Neat, convenient, easy to use, affordable |
| We don't like | It's very picky but you may lose the end cap |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
When Apple decided not to build a floppy drive into its Macs, it forced users to transfer data either via the internet or by burning CDs. Although heralded as 'forward thinking' (by Apple aficionados, of course) it caused untold problems for many users who neither had nor wanted access to either.
Nowadays, some PCs are supplied without floppy drives although at around a tenner a shot their omission seems short-sighted at best and penny-pinching at worst. Having said that, floppies are now generally too small to hold the amount of data users today typically want to transfer. They would struggle to hold a couple of medium res pics from a digital camera.
And while CDs can hold 700+Mb of data, you need a CD writer and there's the faff of running through the burning process. And, although they may be cheap, you end up with a CD you can't do anything else with (we won't go down the road of CD-RW or multi-session writing).
Drive on
In short, we need a more convenient method of data transfer. You can use flash cards (see - review of USB Card Readers and Flash cards) and, indeed, these are good solutions. But here's an even better one - Crucial's Gizmo USB drives.
These are neat, er, gizmos, smaller than a lipstick and thinner than a CD case. An end cap pulls off to reveal a USB plug which you can plug directly into a computer's USB socket or a USB cable. The device appears in My Computer and Windows Explorer as a Removable Disk and you can copy data to and from it just like a normal disk drive.
You need Windows XP/Me/2000 or Mac OS 9.1 or higher to use the drive and no drivers are required with these operating systems. It will also run on USB 1.1 but for hi speed performance you need USB 2.
To and fro
Data transfer speeds will also vary from one computer to another, and depend on what else you have running, but plugging in the big guy - the 1Gb Gizmo - we copied 1GBb of data from a hard drive to the Gizmo in around five to six minutes.
Maybe you could wish for faster data transfer but unless you're into industrial espionage, the speed will be more than adequate. Copying the same 1Gb of data from hard disk-to-hard disk took about three minutes so the Gizmo's not a sluggard and it's far faster and more convenient that burning a CD.
Copying from the Gizmo to a hard drive and deleting data from the Gizmo was much faster, typically around two minutes.
The box includes a lanyard to facilitate carrying. It's also useful to help you find the device as it's easy to misplace on a crowded desk.
The unit is thin enough so you can plug several of them side by side into multiple USB slots on the back of a computer. This is ideal for copying and swapping large amounts of data.
Conclusion
The Gizmos are really neat devices, far faster and more convenient than floppies and CDs for transferring data between computers. They fill a much-needed gap in the market and if you find yourself needing to transfer data between computers, you really want to have one or two Gizmos in your pocket.
