|
V-Tec V-Drive USB
Flash Drive |
|
Author : Wayne Date :
6th June 2002 |
| ...Product |
V-Drive USB Flash Drive |
| ...Manufacturer |
V-Tec |
| ...Supplier |
V-Tec |
| ...Price |
RRP £42.00 |
Testing :
With the V-Drive plugged in Windows ME/2000/XP will automatically
set up the required drivers and you're ready to roll. The
first thing you'll need to do is open up My Computer or Windows
Explorer and run the "passid.exe" TSR program.
From here you enter the supplied default password in order
to access the drive. Once done you can then lock the drive
and change the password to something easier to remember.
Just for the hell of it I looked at the drive info
under SiSoft Sandra.
And while I was there I figured I'd benchmark it too.
I'm not going to spend too much time weighing up the performance
of the V-Drive as I doubt very much this is a big issue when
buying this type if device. For the record I've seen both
higher and lower scores than this but none were tested on
this particular machine with this particular OS so it's no
biggie. I think perhaps the best indicator is the fact that
it considerably outperforms the 100MB ZIP Drive reference
score of 580kB/sec coming in at 748kB/sec.
Getting on to a little real world testing shows the same traits
exhibited by all Flash Drives. Transferring a single 30MB file took
just shy of a minute (just over 500k/sec) while the same size
transfer consisting of 316 separate files took more than three times
as long at 190 seconds or 3 minutes 10 seconds. This isn't a V-Drive
specific issue as I said, it's a problem you'll notice with every
similar drive on the market.
I guess you could complain that you can burn a 650MB
CD-R in not much longer than it takes to fill a 32MB Flash Drive but
that'd be missing the point. If you own a fast CD-RW and all your
data movements are from you to others then no doubt this is the way
to go but the whole idea of the V-Drive is that you can collect data
from any machine at any location with nothing more than a USB port
to work with and then transport it to any other machine anywhere
else with the same criteria, not to mention you don't have to pay
for a blank CD-R every time. It's about convenience not speed.
Just for the record I ran several apps, MP3's and
video formats directly from the V-Drive and as expected they all
pretty much ran flawlessly.
Conclusion :
There's a lot of these devices on the market and not a
whole lot to differentiate one from the other. Unlike graphics cards
where differences between one card and another can be huge, it
pretty much all boils down to price, design and quality and the
V-drive notches up points in each of these categories. With a street
price of around £38 the V-drive is one of the better value options.
It's not the cheapest but it is good value for money. On the design
front the V-Drive is attractive because of its ergonomic design, not
because it looks like something from a 1960s sci-fi movie and on the
quality front the V-Drive seems fairly sturdy despite its
diminuative proportions. My only concern was that there seemed to be
some play in the actual USB plug part of the drive but this didn't
worsen during testing so I hope it's just a quirk of the design
rather than a potential weakness.
I didn't mention it in the body of the review but the
ability to make the V-drive bootable under Windows XP adds greatly
to its flexibility while for data that you need to keep secure the
V-Drive is certainly a lot safer than either floppies of
CD-R/CD-RWs. The data archive life of 10 years is pretty
reassuring.
Cram it with text files and it's a portable briefcase,
with MP3s and its a portable jukebox, with contact details and it's
a mobile phone book, with diagnostic software and it's a mobile
technician. Everyone should have at least one of these units tucked
in a pocket or swinging round their neck, you won't know you need it
until you do!
Thanks to Mike Bain of Diamond Marketing and to
V-Tec
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