Review: USB Drives - Part 1
Ian Waugh looks at USB flash drives - the good, the bad and the beautiful. Part 1
There can hardly be any computer user who doesn't have at least one USB memory stick, flash drive, dongle - call them what you will. They have become an essential part of computing, a convenient way of transporting data, much easier than floppy disks - remember those? - or burning CDs or DVDs.
In fact, there are now so many USB drives, it's not easy to know what to buy. Do you want capacity, ruggedness, speed, reliability, good looks or what?
To help unravel some of these questions, we look at half a dozen USB flash drives to see what they have to offer.
Need for Speed
Don't get too hung up on the speed results. We used three pieces of software to benchmark the drives and, as you might guess, they produced slightly different results although near enough for jazz as they say.
Oddly, however, some of our results were faster than those claimed by the manufacturer - an odd state of affairs, indeed! So we obviously weren't using the same benchmarking software. Or perhaps the drives were updated since the packaging was printed.
The speed can also be affected by other processes running on the computer so use the speed results as guide and a comparison, not as a definitive measure.
Hey Good Lookin'
Since flash drives are so ubiquitous, manufacturers look for ways to make their drives stand out from the crowd - and to add additional functionality if they can.
Appearance is obviously one way of doing this and it's amazing to see how many different designs you can build around a memory chip and connector! Designers are quickly realising that detachable caps are not a good idea as they can easily get lost so most drives now have a way to prevent this.
Robustness is also a consideration, especially if the drive is used 'on the road' or in a busy office where it could be stood on. Many drives have a loop for attaching to a key ring or the like; another way to make it harder to lose.
Security is important, too, and some drives come with built-in security software.
U3
Many drives now come installed with the U3 Launcher. This allows you to use custom-built applications that can be installed on and run from the drive itself. Any data they write to the host computer is removed when the drive is ejected.
The U3 Launcher offers software in five categories - games, internet, multimedia, utilities and security. For the most part they are open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office but you can also access and download hundreds of both free and paid-for U3 programs from www.u3.com. It's a neat idea which allows you to transport and use media, documents and your internet browser safely and securely from one system to another.
We'll conclude the first part by looking at two drives, one old, one cheap, to use as a point of comparison with the ones in Part 2.
Dell Equal Logic 1Gb £??.??
Read: 16.8MB/s
Write: 3.9MB/s
We'll start with this as it's one of the oldest in our collection, a typical 'utilitarian' drive whose price is lost in the mists of time. It's quite solid, has a small LED to show operation and a loop on the end to attach to a key ring, for example. However, the cap is not attached to the body and so could easily be lost.
Speed-wise, it's actually no slouch. For what was probably a cheap drive, for simply storing and transporting files it does a grand job.
Company Lexar
Web www.lexar.com www.lexar.com
Price Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly 2Gb £5.99
We Like Cheap
We don't Like Detachable cap
Rating 7/10
This is another 'utility' drive, bought quite cheaply although much more recently and it's still very much a current model.
It's quite small with a terrible transparent cap that also covers half the drive. The cap has a loop for attaching to a key ring and the drive clips into it. It's quite a tight fit and you'd be unlucky to lose the drive but it would be better to have the loop on the drive than the cap. An LED in the end of the drive shows activity.
We rated the read/write speed at 18.6/6.7MB/s so it's not a slowcoach and the drive works very well.
If all you want to do is carry around small amounts of data, drives like these will quite adequately do the job. However, if you want something a bit faster, more rugged and more secure, you'll need something a little more advanced. We look at four such drives in USB Drives Part 2.
