Selasa, 25 Maret 2008

The Best USB Keys

USB flash drives aren't just for storing files anymore. Plugged into a laptop or desktop, thumb drives can run a range of portable apps without touching your hard drive.

If you don't own a USB flash drive (also known as a USB key or thumb drive) by now, you've probably never been to a trade show. Never has a more useful item been given away by so many. Small and pocketable, these devices are about the size of a thumb (hence the name "thumb drive") and can hold plenty of data; some can even run applications.

If you've been relying on some piddling 16MB USB flash drive with a USB 1.1 connection for transporting data from work to home, you should realize that mere portability doesn't cut it. You want speed and space to grow. Today's USB keys are all USB 2.0–ready and boast capacities as high as 32GB—with high prices to match. The sweet spot is 4GB. There you'll find reasonably priced USB keys with worthwhile extras and all the space you need (for now).

A key use of thumb drives today is for portable applications—software you can run from the drive without installing it to Windows. With portable apps, you can slip the equivalent of your entire PC into your pocket using any USB key, as long as you can find an actual PC to plug into. They're a great way to maintain privacy and circumvent the rules (not that we're advocating that). For example, your IT might deny use of certain browsers or e-mail clients on a computer, but you can run them from the thumb drive (which stores the cookies and history for your portable browser) and have all the messages downloaded to your portable e-mail. It's also a safer way to use your portable apps at any public-access PC, where, for instance, you may forget to log out of a Web-based app like Gmail . In either case, you won't leave a trace of your activities on the system you were using, since all the portable apps should read/write only to the thumb drive. Just don't forget to take the drive home with you.

USB keys can support platforms specifically designed for running portable apps. The best known is U3, which is exclusive to a few select "smart drives," mostly from SanDisk. Another is Ceedo (www.ceedo.com), which powers the PowerToGo software on Lexar USB flash drives. Almost any USB key can run the Ceedo Personal Installer ($29.95), however. Both work under Windows XP and Vista.

Plenty of apps, including AbiWord, Firefox , GIMP, and Thunderbird, can be run in a portable mode without U3 or Ceedo. (See www.portableapps.com for a list.) The problem is that you have to install them yourself. Combining them with a portable-app launcher is much simpler. In fact, the download sites for U3 and Ceedo can install some of the PortableApps.com programs on a USB key in only two clicks.

USB keys aren't just for apps, of course. They provide general storage for anything and everything, from simple documents to entire digital movies. They're handy for transporting photos to a photo printer with an integrated USB port, or dragging around that giant PowerPoint slide show instead of lugging your laptop and a projector.

We reviewed four USB keys with 4GB capacities (and one with 8GB), all fast enough to support ReadyBoost under Windows Vista. ReadyBoost helps your system run faster by borrowing some of the USB flash drive's capacity for Vista to use as virtual memory. Whenever you plug a USB flash drive into a Vista system, the OS checks the drive's random read/write speed. If it's fast enough (and not all USB keys are), Vista's AutoPlay dialog will offer the option Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost. Click on it and you're given the option of reserving space on the USB flash drive as virtual memory. Having a ReadyBoost cache gives applications a bit of a boost when loading, no doubt thanks to Vista's SuperFetch, which preloads frequently used programs into memory. The real impact of ReadyBoost is seen on systems with a low amount of system memory, such as 512MB RAM, the Vista minimum.

A USB flash drive isn't just for Windows storage, however. All the USB flash drives reviewed here offer storage for Mac OS, and most work fine with Linux flavors as well. It's that kind of versatility, along with portability and large capacity, that really makes these drives worth pocketing.—Next: Imation Swivel Flash Drive

Imation Swivel Flash Drive

At first glance, Imation's Swivel Flash Drive looks pretty standard, but the swivel gets its name from one of its nicest features. The attached cap swivels around 180 degrees when you want to plug it in. It's also extremely inexpensive and has a fast read speed. The downside is that it has the worst write speed among the USB flash drives tested.

The Swivel comes with a full neck lanyard, so you can wear the drive under a shirt. It can be detached from the lanyard via a plastic clip when needed. Be thankful for the lanyard, as the drive is so light and small as to be insubstantial. Even with the swiveling cap out of the way, the drive is short, measuring 56mm by 17mm by 12mm. The casing has a small yellow activity light on one side, and opposite it is a feature no one else offered amid the crop of USB flash drives we tested: a lock switch to prevent overwriting anything on the drive.

On the drive itself you'll find the Imation Drive Manager. This utility, a single .exe extension file for Windows, runs from the drive without installing to your system's hard drive. It can create partitions on the Swivel, one public and one secure. The utility is also used to create the password for the secure partition. If you want to nuke the data, the Drive Manager also can format the drive or a single partition for FAT16 or FAT32 (which leaves it usable on Mac OS and Linux). With the correct driver installed, you can even use the Swivel in Windows 98 SE.

The 4GB Swivel costs only $49.99 (direct) from Imation. At that price, there's no reason not to go for the 8GB version, which costs $89.99 direct—not much more than 4GB models from other vendors. There are also lower-capacity models: 2GB for $29.99 direct and 1GB for $19.99 direct. As of this writing, Imation's Web site needs a serious e-commerce update. It lists even smaller models, down to 256MB, that are now kaput. The prices on Imation's site are higher than the direct prices that the company's PR people quoted to us (the 4GB model is listed at $69.99 on the company's site).

All the drives we looked at are enhanced for ReadyBoost, but the Swivel is the only one not to proclaim this on its package. It says only "Works with Windows Vista," in an easy-to-miss icon on the back. Regardless, the Swivel had no problem offering a ReadyBoost cache under Vista to help speed up that operating system while the drive is attached to your PC.

The drive itself has a fantastic read speed of 26.7 megabytes per second, in line with the best of the bunch here. But the write speed is not so good: On our copy tests, the Swivel managed only 6.2 MBps on average. The fastest, the SanDisk Cruzer Contour, had a write time almost three times as fast.

Despite that flaw, the Imation Swivel Flash Drive is a decent product, and with its low price, it should be on your radar.

Compare the Imation Swivel Flash Drive's features and performance with other flash drives.

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