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Vantec ezShare Adapter

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0500

This is the Air Jordan sneaker of sneakernets

Don’t be fooled by the Vantec ezShare’s unassuming looks. This simple six-foot white cable with its Type A USB plugs on either end is actually one of the easiest ways to quickly moves files between two computers. Just plug one end into an available USB port on a box running Windows (XP and up), and plug the other end into the second box.

A Windows Explorer–like app will auto-launch on each machine, letting you drag and drop folders and files between the two PCs. If this sounds an awful lot like Data Drive Thru’s Tornado (reviewed November 2007), that’s because the two products are pretty similar. The file-explorer UI and software functionality of both products are virtually the same. It’s close enough that we have a pretty strong suspicion that the underlying chipsets and software come from the same factory in China. There are a few key differences, though.

The first is the construction. The Tornado has auto-retracting cables, making it a nice portable package. On the other hand, the ezShare works with Macs. That’s right, by plugging one side into a PC and the other side into a Mac (10.4 or greater), you get the same Windows Explorer–like view and ability to drag and drop files between the two machines. That’ll make it even easier to switch from OS X to Windows 7 this fall!

We compared our original Tornado with the ezShare by copying files between a Win XP ThinkPad T60 Core Duo notebook and our midrange Core i7 Dream Machine running Windows 7 64-bit. It was virtually a tie, with both transfer cables taking about 530 seconds to move a 9GB file from the notebook to the desktop. Actually, we’re happy to report that we could even move the large file; after we published our review of the Tornado in 2007, some people reported problems moving files larger than 4GB, and we even subsequently experienced occasional issues when using Windows XP 64-bit. Data Drive Thru was never able to replicate the problem, however. It now seems likely that the culprit was some obscure configuration of the OS, as we didn’t experience any such conflicts with Windows 7.

A simple Windows Explorer-like interface pops up on both machines when copying files.

We also tested the ezShare with smaller transfers and moved about 1.34GB of image files in 96 seconds—top-notch performance for USB 2.0 transfers.

So what’s not to like? The ezShare’s presentation doesn’t exactly impress. While the Tornado makes for a tidy package, the ezShare looks like a plain, run-of-the-mill cable. But at $27 vs. $50 for the Tornado, we’ll live with the ugly cable. And with Mac compatibility thrown in to boot, the ezShare is an obvious winner. Now all it needs to win a Kick Ass is Linux support.

ID Vault 2009

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:15:46 -0500

Lock up your sensitive data

In the two years since we reviewed the first version of ID Vault, phishing attacks have increased by more than 180 percent, identity theft is up 25 percent, and organized crime has figured out ways to hijack financial sites and DNS servers.

For the most part, putting financial information into a browser is about as safe as walking through Central Park in one of those Chuck Bronson Death Wish movies.

So, you’d think ID Vault would be one of those tools you’d put on a chain and wear around your neck everywhere you go, but it isn’t. For those not up on ID Vault, it’s an encrypted USB key that stores your user names and passwords. If you want to go to your bank, eBay, or Amazon, you plug in the ID Vault and use a virtual keyboard to punch in a code (to thwart key loggers). The ID Vault client on your PC then goes to the site, makes sure you’re actually on a legitimate IP address for that particular website, and logs in for you.

The ID Vault will only work with Internet Explorer—uh, unless it’s IE8.

It sounds like the perfect way to conduct your business without losing sleep over security. Unfortunately, ID Vault 2009 has the same warts it did two years ago. You have to install client software for it to work on a PC and it only works with IE7. The first count could be excused, as you really should never enter sensitive information into someone else’s computer, anyway. But lack of third-party browser support is the killer. And it doesn’t help that the freaking thing doesn’t yet support Internet Explorer 8, which most security conscious people have already adopted. D’oh! IE8 support is expected sometime this summer, but that doesn’t help you out now, does it?

Then there’s the cost. The initial unit costs $49 with one year of service included. An additional year costs $39. We know the product claims to be one of the few ways to prevent pharming (mass router or DNS hijacking), but that’s pretty steep for just 12 months.

Given all these negatives, ID Vault 2009 is a difficult product to recommend for anyone except the truly paranoid who are willing to live with its quirks.

Clickfree Transformer

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:45:08 -0500

Keeping backups simple, stupid

Clickfree’s Transformer may look like an overweight USB key, but it is—forgive us, Optimus Prime—more than meets the eye.

Plug any generic external USB hard drive into the Transformer, then plug the Transformer into a USB port on your PC, and a backup app auto-launches and starts a countdown to begin an automatic file backup of common file extensions. You can interrupt the countdown and add more file extensions that the app doesn’t recognize by default. The document formats it grabs are fairly extensive, but if you want it to also copy that comic book archive in .cbr format, you’ll need to add the extension first

With the Transformer residing between your PC and a USB hard drive, all your data can be backed up (or restored) effortlessly.

You use the same application to restore your documents; you can choose to restore individual files or all of them, if needed. The files are stored in plain view on the hard disc, and even better, this doesn’t preclude you from using the drive for other purposes. And instead of converting your drive to some obscure ST disk format that you wouldn’t be able to access should you lose the Transformer, you can access the drive from another PC.

There’s very little to dislike about the Transformer, except that it’s too focused on file-based backups with common extensions. The backup will ignore .exe files—so if you purchased an app that you save in a folder on your desktop, you’d better remember to add the extension. We think the Transformer app should automatically back up all files on the desktop and in My Documents, on general principle, regardless of the extensions.

Still, that’s a weakness that will only hurt nerds in an HD failure. This is a great solution for those friends and family members who never manage to back up their PCs. The Transformer will do the job and do it easily, which means that it will get done.

Corsair Flash Survivor GT

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:48:10 -0500

We’ve used too many Jack Bauer references lately, but c’mon, how could we review this key and not say it’s the one Jackie boy would use?

The 8GB Flash Survivor GT, after all, is shock and water resistant—and if your service automatic runs out of ammo, you can even fling its hard aluminum body at someone’s head. But how does it perform?

Quite well, actually. Older keys can deliver great speeds with medium and large files but are painfully slow when transferring small ones. The Survivor GT, however, is speedy with all file sizes in both reading and writing tests. So if you need to copy that PowerPoint presentation off of Salazar’s laptop before the building explodes, this is the thumb drive for you. The Survivor GT handily beats the original Flash Voyager GT in all our read and write tests.

We also tested the Survivor by dunking it in boiling water, freezing it, flinging it against a concrete wall, burning it with a butane torch, dropping it down four flights of stairs, and attaching it to a car muffler during a lunch outing, and it, well, survived. It didn’t look pretty in the end, but the data was still intact.

Not all is perfect with the Survivor though. Our unit, like others from Corsair, didn’t include any bundled encryption software, although it is supposed to ship with TrueCrypt freeware. Other small problems: One rubber grip wasn’t glued on the unit, and the device made an annoying squeaking noise when closing—not good if two dozen ninjas are parked inside the room you’re about to enter. Still, if speed and durability are your top concerns, we can’t imagine getting a key that’s any tougher than this baby.

Corsair 16GB Flash Voyager

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:02:07 -0500

Ain’t technology wonderful? Just a few years ago our mouths were agape at 1GB USB thumb drives that cost $500. Yet here we have Corsair pushing the 16GB mark for $140—a mere $8.75 per GB.

The Flash Voyager looks the same as previous models, except for its color. The standard-speed device is blue, while the faster GT model is red. Although the rubberized case gives the unit a fairly rugged feel, we have torn through the rubber key-ring loop on older units. Oddly, no driver or encryption software was included with our device. Corsair normally bundles the open-source TrueCrypt software with its products, which is passable though inconvenient.

In performance, the fat Flash Voyager is an interesting story. Of the seven keys we’ve tested recently, the 16GB Flash Voyager is the second fastest in small-file writes, taking about eight minutes to write 10,315 files. The stupendously fast Kingston 4GB Secure Traveler took three minutes, while the rest of the pack clocked in with scores of 20 minutes or more.

The Flash Voyager’s biggest weakness is in writing medium and large files. The key took 4:10 (min:sec) to write about 2GB of large files, which was almost a minute slower than even the hard-disk-based Verbatim Store ’n’ Go we reviewed last month.

The 16GB Flash Voyager also trailed the Verbatim in writing medium-size JPG files. Not pretty. Payback came in read speeds, as the Flash Voyager aced the small-, medium-, and large-file reads, achieving speeds equal to those of the fastest keys we’ve benchmarked.

So what you have is a key that reads files very quickly and is pretty good at writing small files but could take a minute longer than a hard-disk unit and almost four times longer than the Flash Voyager GT to write large files, which is odd because a 16GB key seems as though it were made to write huge ISO and image files, not read gigabytes of text files. We don’t think the medium- and large-file write performance is terminal, but it certainly doesn’t reach the yee-haw speeds of its red-cased brethren.

Verbatim 12GB Store

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:19:18 -0500

Team Flash can’t compete with Team Magnetic on desktop computers, but the flash guys may have finally found a competitor it can conquer.

Unfortunately for Verbatim, its new 12GB micro-drive USB thumb drive is the victim. The Store ’n’ Go USB HD Drive uses Cornice’s Dragon-2 12GB miniature hard drive. This sixth-gen drive features lower power consumption, a 40 percent smaller size, and a 300 percent capacity increase. It also features a motion sensor, so it won’t die if you drop it while it’s running.

The Store ’n’ Go’s performance wasn’t stunning against flash drives—but it wasn’t atrocious either. It was the slowest in all our real-world tests using small text files, medium-size image files, and large files in both read and write; however, it didn’t always lose by huge margins. The 4GB OCZ Rally 2 key, for example, took 2:54 (min:sec) to write 1.9GB of large files while the Store ’n’ Go took 2:59. The Verbatim also took slightly longer than the other keys we tested to write 10,000 small files. The Store ’n’ Go is like a slow USB key in write performance, and its read times edge into the mediocre range. Using synthetic benchmarks, we saw about 10MB/s read and write speeds—which is what Verbatim rates the key for.

Performance isn’t the only factor here though. There’s also the gigabytes-per-buck balance, and that’s where Team Flash scores decisively. Compared to the last five keys we reviewed, the Store ’n’ Go is a bit pricey. The 8GB Corsair Voyager (since renamed Voyager GT) costs about $12.40 a gig, while the Store ’n’ Go runs about $13.10 per gig. What’s more, the 16GB version of the Voyager runs just $8.75 a gig (it is, however, slower).

That doesn’t leave the Store ‘n’ Go in a great position. It’s slower than all of the flash keys we’ve reviewed, and its per gigabyte cost is higher. The flash guys aren’t winning any other battles, but they sure as hell win this one.

Patriot Xporter XT 4GB

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:38:44 -0600

The Patriot Xporter XT offers the same capacity at less than half the price of Kingston’s drive (reviewed next). Unfortunately, that’s the only stand-out feature we could find.

Like Corsair’s Flash Voyager, the Xporter XT is dreadfully slow at writing small files, but unlike the Voyager, it doesn’t make up for that weakness with especially speedy large- and medium-file transfers. The Xporter XT also can’t compare to Kingston’s offering, which too is just fair at large- and medium-size files, but crazy-fast with small files.

Don’t get us wrong, the Xporter XT is no slouch. It’s close in write performance to the OCZ Rally and the SanDisk Cruzer that we rated highly in November. But that was before the 8GB Corsair and 4GB Kingston keys arrived. And given the Xporter XT’s lack of U3 support or basic encryption utilities, we think there are better choices out there.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ FEET: Lowest cost per gigabyte on the street.
- METERS: Gets aced by the competition in performance
Verdict: 7
URL: www.patriotmem.com

Kingston Datatraveler Secure 4GB

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:38:44 -0600

Kingston’s DataTraveler Secure is billed as an “enterprise-grade” flash drive. Translated for civvies, that means 256-bit AES hardware encryption, an IPX8 waterproof rating, and a titanium shell. Oh yeah, and optimization for small files. While almost every key we’ve tested in the last few months choked on the 10,000 Word docs we feed them during testing, the DataTraveler Secure was able to write that onslaught of files in three minutes instead of the usual 20 minutes.

That’s a huge difference, and for someone who needs to grab 500MB of small Office files off the server at the end of the day, it’s well worth the extra bucks Kingston charges. And we do mean extra. Based on street pricing and formatted capacity, the Kingston key costs you around $61 per gig compared to $21 for Corsair’s drive. Even the SanDisk Cruzer that we looked at in November is cheap by comparison.

Still, that’s the price you pay for small-file performance. In other words, it’s a drive that’s not only good at writing AVI files but also DOC files. And for the office drone, that’s probably money well spent.
-Gordon Mah Ung

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ USB: Fastest key for small-file writes that we've ever tested.
- PS/2: The chunky design and Beverly Hills pricing makes this a tough key to swallow.
Verdict: 9 - KickAss

URL: www.kingston.com