Thumbs Up?
With so many brands of USB flash drives (thumb drives) out there, I only had to ask fellow Mac Addict, Clarence, what he would recommend."Transcend!", he offered without hesitation. And with credible reason too "because Transcend slaps a 2-year warranty" on their products and "I've been using three of their flash drives for over a year now. No problems, man!", he enthused with a smile.
In addition, Transcend offers a complete memory, video and storage solution, ranging from RAM modules, video cards to digital camera memory sticks. So the chances of ending up with a 'lemon' stick in disguise seemed rather remote.
After heading down to Sim Lim Square last Sunday with Seng Aik and Clarence, we located the best deal on the block at Storage Studio. For my effort in handing over two hundred and thirty six Merlion Pesos, I walked out with 512 megabytes worth of storage capacity in a size no longer than the length of my thumb.
The cost of flash media has dropped over the months due to cheaper production and wide spread use. In the early days, they cost a little more than one dollar per megabyte and offered only USB 1.1 transfer speeds. But prices have since fallen to less than 45 cents per megabyte, especially if you are aiming for higher storage capacities of half to a full gigabyte in size.
Features have also been improved upon. From USB 2.0 transfer speeds, physical locking mechanisms to password protection features, this particular thumb drive can be configured to boot a PC. Naturally this option, along with the password protection feature, is available only on the Windows platform. The one thing lacking, said Siva, is an on-the-fly file encryption. In fact, he would have gotten a kick out of having a three-wrong-passwords-and-all-your-files-are-erased option.
Though the Transcend already came pre-formatted for PCs, the drive was put to work after a quick reformat. This was done to remove any inherent kinks and to start from a clean slate. Transferring a number of files worth a total of 100 megabytes, it clocked an average of 2.5MBs per second while connected to my G4's USB 2.0 PCI card. With a USB 1.1 connection to a Rev. A Titanium PowerBook however, it only averaged about 500KBs per second.
In any case, the Transcend’s transfer rate was higher and consistent compared to the 750 megabyte zip disks I have been using. They scandalously clocked in at 450 to 500KBs per second. While my Zips have a tendency of being fickle when it comes to large file transfers, the Transcend pushed the data through smoothly without hiccups.
Well Siva got to see it first hand yesterday evening when I brought him a selection of albums by Lenny Kravitz. "Dei, you and your high bit-rate AAC files again!", he yelled. But with the smooth transfer, the files were disposed off in quick succession. And all in one neat package.
Postscript wise, my drive is now acting up. After arriving home last night, my drive experienced a hang in the midst of a large file transfer. A quick check with Transcend's website revealed that they were aware of the problem and suggested that users download their proprietary mFormat utility. Once done, the user is to perform a complete reformat of the thumb drive to lock out and isolate bad sectors.
Being a flash storage medium, I wondered about 'bad sectors' as this would normally be associated with hard drives. Though doing as I was told, there were no bad sectors to be found. In all appearances, the Transcend seemed in good working condition. And I proceeded to transfer another batch of files. As I feared, the hang re-occured.
So I'll be heading back to Sim Lim to see if I can obtain a replacement. It would have been acceptable if the problem could be isolated, enabling me to continue using my drive. However in light of not having any choice in the matter, the drive is useless as the integrity of the media is compromised. We'll see what happens later.
posted by Teutoburg @ 4:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home