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Corsair Releases "Practically Indestructible" 64GB Flash Drive

Paul Lilly — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:28:18 -0500

Corsair on Thursday announced its new 64GB Flash Survivor USB drive, which the company claims is the "most rugged high-capacity flash drive on the market." And by the looks of things, they're probably right.

Encased in CNC-milled, aircraft grade aluminum, Corsair says the new drive is pretty much indestructible. Each unit comes molded in a shock-dampening collar and EPDM seal, providing water-resistance up to a depth of 200 meters. Corsair notes that reviewers have dropped, baked, boiled, microwaved, and even run over the Survivor with an SUV in an attempt to show just how durable the drive really is.

"The new 64GB Flash Survivor takes the industry's most popular rugged USB drive and takes it to the next level, with a huge amount of storage space, plus best-in-class performance," said Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing for Corsair. "The 64GB Survivor is ideal for storing and transporting your music, videos, pictures, and other important files, safe in the knowledge that your data will be safeguarded inside the Survivor's protective shell."

The drive is available now with a street price around $170. To help justify the cost, Corsair says each drive comes bundled with a USB extension cable and dog tags, and comes backed by a 10-year warranty.

Image Credit: Corsair via Legit Reviews

Super Talent's New Pico Mini USB Drives Reminds Us of Skittles

Paul Lilly — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:55:11 -0500

You probably can't taste the rainbow by popping one of Super Talent's new Pico Mini USB drives into your mouth like you can with Skittles, but the new drives are every bit as colorful.

Like the Pico drives, the Pico Mini are built using COB technology, which Super Talent says makes it possible to stuff "impressive Flash capacities into extremely small packages." And small they are, measuring just 32 x 15 x3 mm, or 1.3 x 0.6 x 0.1 inches when shunning the metric system.

More than just aesthetic appeal, the color designates the capacity of the new drives:

2GB, 150X (Orchid Pink)
4GB, 200X (Lime Green)
8GB, 200X (Sky Blue)
16GB, 200X (Classic Black)

The drives will begin shipping this week for $10 (2GB), $15 (4GB), $24 (8GB) and $40 (16GB).

Image Credit: Super Talent

SanDisk: World's First Push Button Backup USB Drive

Benson Hong — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:40:36 -0600

With the simple touch of a button, SanDisk has created a solution to easily back up crucial files on your flash drive. SanDisk has announced today that their Ultra Backup USB drive will be available in capacities ranging from 8GB to 64GB with prices between $40 and $200. This patent-pending backup technology has a backup capacity of up to 64GB, more than enough space to store any important files you may have. The introduction of this new one-button backup technology alongside its already-popular dual layer of both password protection and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hardware encryption will make this one of the safest flash drives around.

SanDisk didn’t forget about their classics, though. The Cruzer underwent a facelift and is now sporting a new contemporary look featuring a sliding, cap-less USB connector. What hasn’t changed is the continuation of U3 technology allowing users to run applications directly off the drive.

Toshiba 320GB Portable Drive

David Murphy — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:40:00 -0500

Toshiba’s 320GB portable drive is so plain it doesn’t even have a real name. It’s just the Toshiba 320GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive, which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as Western Digital’s My Passport Elite, the Toshiba 320’s primary competition in terms of size, speed, and software (see our review of the Elite here).

Toshiba’s middle-of-the-road drive would benefit
from additional backup and synchronization features.

The USB-only Toshiba 320 posted the slowest real-world read speeds of any drive we’ve tested. However, these lapses represent only a four percent difference in real-world performance when compared to the fastest non-proprietary drive we’ve tested, Western Digital’s My Passport Elite. Four percent is four percent, but it’s not enough to make a significant difference.

Fortunately, the Toshiba 320’s poor read speeds were ameliorated by quick write speeds—the second-fastest we’ve seen from our write benchmark. It’s a great accomplishment considering that the write-speed victor, Buffalo’s DriveStation Combo 4 (reviewed September 2008), uses a proprietary TurboUSB utility to squeak even more speed out of its connection.

Portable USB storage devices tend to post similar read and write speeds in our benchmark tests, so we use the drives’ included software as a way to further distinguish between them. We dinged the My Passport Elite for offering too many redundant software options, including no less than three backup and synchronization programs. Toshiba’s drive solves this issue by including only two programs.

NTI Shadow 3 is a simple application for backing up your files. It comes with both synchronization and scheduled-backup options. That’s it. The other piece of software, NTI Ripper, attempts to fill a void that iTunes already filled long ago. Turning CD tracks into digital audio files lost its complexity five years ago—and that’s being generous.

As a drive, the Toshiba 320 is competitive. As a backup solution, it ignores some of the more exciting possibilities in the storage space, such as file encryption. Somewhere between the software-bloated My Passport Elite and stripped down Toshiba 320 lies the perfect backup/storage device. We’ll keep searching for it.

OCZ Rally 2 4GB

Josh Norem — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:14:14 -0600

After receiving several reader requests to check out the Rally 2 key from OCZ Technology, we were persuaded to call one in. As it turns out, the Rally 2 is a darn sexy flash drive. It’s devoid of any software, which doesn’t surprise us: OCZ has always stood for “performance first,” thus it makes sense that the Rally 2 is designed for one thing and one thing only—fast data transfers. Granted, it’s not as fast as the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB, but it offers double the capacity at the same price point, making it a mighty compelling alternative.

OCZ labels the Rally 2 a “dual channel” drive, meaning it’s able to read and write data from two channels of memory at the same time, sort of like a striped RAID array. OCZ also claims that this 4GB key is optimized for large file transfers—5MB or larger. This certainly seems to be the case, because the Rally drive absolutely choked on an assortment of Word documents that we use in our file transfer test, but it breezed through the larger test files. Of the four keys reviewed here, it was the second-fastest in both read and write tests.

Its aluminum chassis is sleek and seems quite durable. The top of the key sports a small hole that’s intended for use with the included lanyard—it’s too small to be used with a keychain, unfortunately.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
+ WHISKEY: Very fast read/writes, sleek design, and slim chassis.
- HOUSE KEY: No software bundle; not as fast as SanDisk’s key.
Verdict: 8
URL: www.ocztechnology.com

GuardID ID Vault

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:31:32 -0600

Today’s simple username/password system is a single-factor authentication mechanism—your credentials are the only information necessary. When an evildoer has that information, whether it was stolen with a keylogger or a “phishing” email, you’re screwed.

Two-factor authentication schemes are much more secure. They require you to know something and to have something before your account information is unlocked.

GuardID tries to create a two-factor authentication scheme with its clever ID Vault USB key, err, “password lock-box.” You program the key with a master PIN, and then browse to, say, your bank’s website. Once there, ID Vault safely encrypts and stores your user name and password on a smart chip in the key. You will then need the key to be in your PC when you want to access that website. Furthermore, anytime you visit a website that requires a username and password, the ID Vault software will ask if you want to add that info to the vault.

With the account information safely on the key, you never have to type your password or username again—just your master PIN, via an onscreen keyboard, which is resistant to keylogging.

The ID Vault compares financial website IP addresses with its own database of known addresses and alerts you to a possible phishing attempt if the address is incorrect. This should protect you if your PC’s hostfile or even if your ISP’s DNS cache has been poisoned to redirect you from Wells Fargo to a server in Paraguay.

We found the ID Vault to be a great concept but somewhat lacking in execution. First, the key relies on Microsoft’s .Net runtimes, so it’s not particularly portable. Firefox users are also out of luck, for now at least. And even worse, if you’re at a public Internet terminal or a friend’s house, you can’t use the key without installing software.

That effectively neutralizes the key for people who lack security discipline. For paranoids who would never use an unclean computer for sensitive work, the lack of portability isn’t an issue. But still, why not store the software you need on the key itself; and couldn’t it be a little smaller?

Despite these limitations, we see potential here. If the company can figure out a guest mode that doesn’t require software installation, it could be a kick-ass device. Right now, it’s suited primarily for the hyper-vigilant.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
Verdict: 7
URL: www.idvault.com