Pen Drive & Flash Dio USB Drives
Installation
There’s hardly any installation required to use the drives. Its plug & play in its true sense. Simply plug it into a USB port and the OS will install the necessary drivers. However for Win 95/98 /98SE drivers need to be installed manually and it’s supplied along with the drive. If you have trouble figuring out on how to do this, the included manual gives detailed graphical descriptions of everything you need to know. Windows ME/2000 and XP will simply detect the drive on the fly. The system we tested both these drives were on a XP platform. Here’s what it looks like after the required drivers have been loaded.
Pen Drive in Windows XP
Flash Dio in a Win 98 System :
There after you can simply use the drive just as any other ordinary disk drive. You can drag and drop files or just perform anything you’ll do on a conventional hard drive.
As you can see the Flash Dio comes in many flavoring colors. Unlike the Pen Drive all the internal circuitry can be seen through the transparent plastic material of the Flash Dio. So what’s the difference between the Pen Drive and the Flash Dio other than its outer characteristics you might ask? Actually there’s hardly any difference between the two except for their looks. However the Pen drive boasts a few additional features such as a Write/Delete switch to protect from accidental erasures.
The great feature about the Pen Drive and the Flash Dio is that both of them have been installed with their own processor and memory making them almost like any conventional hard drive on your system. Only difference is these are extremely portable. The Pen Drive and the Flash Dio were supplied to us very graciously by Bestradeusa.com. They are yet another huge on-line retailer for PC components. (Check them out, they have some really cool stuff in there.) They describe these drives in simply one strong sentence. “Why carry a PC? When you can put it on a keychain.” Now ain’t that cool or what? You can either put it in your key chain or the drive comes with a chain so that you can put it around your neck as shown here in the picture.
(Pic taken from BestradeUSA.com)
Both the Pen Drive and the Flash Dio are merely 10-20 grams in weight. Now that’s incredible light. It’s no heavier than a floppy, yet holds so much more capacity. The drives even have a built in power saving mode, so if you’re on the move using the drives with your laptop, they will consume power only when used. I tried the drives on a Toshiba Tectra 8100, and it worked just fine. One of the primary concerns I had with this drive are, how well does it perform, and how durable is it. You know how long it takes a floppy to copy a fairly large file. Normally it takes around a minute. I don’t know about you, but I find this very irritable, and I don’t use floppies unless I really really have to. So in order to test the performance I used Sisoft Sandra 2001. Here are the average results of 5 consecutive runs.
Considering the size of the Pen Drive and the Flash Dio I think this is extremely fast. The drives we’re reviewing here are 32MB ones, however even if this is a 512MB drive, it’s still very fast. To put theory into practice I actually got a few mp3 files and some word documents all totaling up to 30MB. The whole copy process took no more than 5 seconds to complete. As the specifications say these drives have a transfer rate of up to 12MB/sec at full speed. Truthfully I hardly felt a difference in performance when copying files to my Pen drive/Flash Dio or to my IBM Deskstar drive. This is not necessarily a good comparison since we deal with quite small file sizes with the Pen Drive and the Flash Dio. Nevertheless it’s still a million times better than the cursed floppy drives, and in the light of things, it does a very good job. As far as performance goes, this is as good as it gets.
Now comes the question of durability. If you look carefully as the specs again you’ll notice that it says these drives can sustain up to a 1000G’s. Now I’m not too sure even if you smash one of these drives on the ground real hard, whether you’d achieve a 1000G’s. Nevertheless the only way to test their claim is to actually do it yourself. If you’re like me, the only real stress my keys receive is when I come home and throw them on the table. Now how many G’s is that I wonder!!! Nevertheless I proceeded towards the garage with the two drives and smashed them on the ground with a considerable amount of force. (Kids don’t do this at home 🙂 ) I’m sure none of you out there would ever want to do anything of this sort, just be glad we tested it for you 🙂 Next I proceeded back to my PC and hooked the drives up.
Bang!!!! They still worked even after all that torture. (This is mainly attributed to the fact that these drives have no moving parts, just internal circuitry and flash memory) I mean you try what I just did with a normal hard drive and it’ll be practically ruined. This clearly shows us to what an extent the manufactures of the Pen drive and the Flash Dio have gone to, in order to make these super durable.
It does not end there; they also claim that both these drives have a data retention capacity of more than 10 years. So once data is written into one of these drives, it’ll still be there uncorrupted for more than 10 years. Think about the alternative, the floppy. I doubt it has a data retention capacity of more than a few months, or most likely it’s less than that too.
