Installation

Now, we will be testing the 256 MB version. I hear you, that's not much Hilbert. I agree, but it still beats the crap out of a floppy-drive isn't it ? This pendrive can hold 256MB, that's 177 floppies people. You run off to your friends or business relationship you got a few documents you'd like to share, think of the possibilities here. pump the bugger with some MP3's or even video-files and take them along.

What's so convenient is that the pen drive has an USB connection and practically any reasonable modern PC has an USB port. Any Windows Operating System newer than Windows ME or even Windows 98 Second Edition (not 100% sure though) will automatically recognize a pen-drive once inserted into the USB port.

Windows XP binds this device as mass-storage device in seconds and without the need to install any software.

It's easy as 1-2-3, you insert the pen drive into the USB port and two seconds later windows added another drive into windows. You can now Now you can read, write, copy, delete and move data from your hard disk drive to the Pen Drive or from the Pen Drive to your hard disk drive.

Minutes after testing the pen-drive my sister called. PC locked up constantly on the internet, email was a mess. Classic signs of a virus eh ? So I told her that I'd install some anti-virus software on her PC. This was the first time I started using the pen drive in real life. Inserted it, copied anti-virus software onto the pendrive. Went to sis, insert the pendrive in her PC and 2 seconds later a new drive with anti-virus software was ready and waiting for me on her PC. That's how easy these things are.

Does the pendrive have a downside then ? Yes .. speed. They read and write very slow. And as always, performance will increase with time. Right now do not expect too much from it in terms of MB per second. Think in terms of KiloByte per second. Don';t get scared though .. it's not slow either.

Let's put the pendrive to the test. We took SiSoft Sandra to measure the performance of the pendrive.

The mainboard is equipped with an integrated USB 2.0 controller. We used this 480Mbit/sec USB 2.0 interface. It's backward-compatible with the USB 1.1.

Let's fire up some benchmarks. This first bechmarks was done with the help of SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.