When browsing the website of the company that I bought my cheap PC from (ITEstate), I came across their USB drives. I couldn’t believe the prices they had on these things!! 1GB for AU$15, 4GB for $44 and 8GB for a crazy $99!! I decided to pick one up, as with my Mac I am often transferring files to my desktop using a USB stick (networking is a pain in the … on a Mac I find). I have an extremely compact 512MB USB drive that is about 1.3mm thick, and I keep in my wallet coin pocket. I have been using that, but occasionally it wasn’t large enough. That and the fact I am very lazy about cleaning up the files on my USB flash drives was a bit annoying.

So I decided to grab one of the 4GB drives. I couldn’t quite justify an 8GB one, as I don’t need that much, but it was so tempting just because it was so cheap!!

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I was really surprised with how small the drive is!! On the website it just showed some generic USB drive that looked huge!! Considering it would just get thrown in a bag it wouldn’t really matter if it wasn’t terribly small. I was pleasantly surprised when I picked up the package with the drive showing through. It was very small, and had a nice big loop on it which is perfect for the clip I have on my keys.

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It shows 3.82GB capacity (formatted, FAT32) which is typical of drive manufacturers. 1GB does NOT mean the 1073741824 bytes it should. I mean the 120GB HDD in my MacBook Pro is only 111.8GB. Yeah yeah “Actual capacity may be less” or whatever they say… These companies need to be taught what a gigabyte is made up of .

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Transfer speeds about about 4MB/second. I am no USB junkie so I don’t know if that is particularly good or horribly bad. My 512MB drive gets the same speed of 4MB/sec when transferring the same file.

It was such a bargain for AU$44, is nice and small, fits on my keyring, and is 4GB!! I swear the “branded” USB drives at the shops are a rip-off. I have had both branded and unbranded USBs, and they were all the same. These might make a nice ReadyBoost drive for Vista, I will have to test it. According to this article, 4MB/sec is well within the 2.5MB/sec spec for ReadyBoost.

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