My New Flash Drive.

i have this tiny 4GB flash drive by Sony called Micro Vault Tiny (MVT). and somehow i managed to fill this little guy with all kinds of personal, work, and school related files. in addition to files i have generated are a large collection of portable apps from PortableApps.com including OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, and Pidgin IM to name a few. it's a good little flash drive, but it's not very fast, and has the potential to get lost or forgotten fairly easily. also space is becoming an issue as i have very little left after numerous downloads of apps and linux iso's.

so what was i to do? i like having a tiny flash drive, but i needed something with a little more room for more junk, and something that i couldn't easily loose. luckily ThinkGeek.com had an effective solution; it's called the PICO drive from SuperTalent. this tiny flash drive packs 8GB of space in a tiny form factor for $29.99.


it's enclose in a metal casing with a chrome finish. it's got some heft to it compared to my MVT, but then the MVT is enclosed in thin plastic. admittedly the MVT is thinner than the PICO, but the PICO's metal casing with a loop (it came included with a chain) gives it some presence and security.


the speed factor with respect to the performance is not as impressive as one would think when you read the product description that the read/write is 200x speed, 30MB/second. my personal real-world experience is as follows, it's slightly faster than my MVT. mind you, Sony does not post any read/write specs with the MVT, so to compare the delta on-paper is a little difficult. it takes almost a minute to load Firefox Portable from the PICO over USB2.0. and even after it's loaded i still have to wait till all the add-ons get initialized; that's another 30 seconds. however the read/write performance is still, though slightly, greater than the MVT.

my only gripe with the PICO is that inserting it into a USB port is a bit of a tight fit. in fact i was a little taken back on how much force was required to insert this thing. on the first few tries, i became a bit afraid that i would damage one of the USB ports on my Mac Mini. it's not an easy feeling when you have to apply a little torque. my MVT was so thin that inserting it was really smooth but it's thinness laid room to intermittent connectivity issues (once inserted, if wiggled, you could disconnect it). the only redeeming value to the PICO's tight squeeze within a USB port is that once it's in. it's not going anywhere.

despite the performance or the tight squeeze, it defies all logic. much like the T.A.R.D.I.S. it's tiny on the outside, but very spacious on the inside with 8GB of storage... at least until the 16GB comes out... which in fact has. plus look how neat it looks with my cell phone charm chained to it.


peace,
@riel