zero_'s Full Review: PQI Intelligent Stick (1 GB) USB 2.0 Flash Drive (...
All the cool kids are carrying around USB flash drives these days.
Sometimes called "thumb drives", or erroneously called "memory sticks" or "jump drives" (that's a Lexar trademark, don't you know), flash drives all have the same basic principle: You have a little box, maybe the size of a small cigarette lighter, that's got some flash memory in it and a little tiny controller that talks to a PC via the USB Mass Storage Device protocol. Stick one of these into an available USB port on any Windows ME or later PC (or, if the gods are favoring you at the moment, maybe a Linux machine or a more recent Mac) and with no divers and minimal fussing about you'll find a new drive letter in your list that you're free to shuttle files back and forth to.
This is a useful thing. It's a very useful thing for businesspeople and others who have actual work to get done, obviously. It's also a very useful thing for hackers and teenaged punks to load their files and software onto otherwise 'secured' library, office, and school machines (and a very annoying thing for the people who have to maintain the above). Flash drives used to be small (in capacity) large (in size) and expensive. All of these properties are steadily reversing themselves, as electronic things tend to do, and we've reached the point where everybody and his brother has a flash drive. Or three.
Me? I have five.
I've got an old 128 megabyte Kingston, I've got two skinny little PNY 256 megabyte drives, and I've got a 1 gig SanDisk Cruzer Mini. I could wax lyrical about them all. I could bang on for pages in three separate reviews.
But I won't, because they're all the bleeding same. It is written that there are only two categories of flash drive: Those that will fit in a USB port which has a cable plugged into the adjacent one, and those that won't. Other than that, they're all the same, nobody cares, pick the manufacturer that's got the cheapest one right at this moment and call it a day.
Except for this flash drive, my fifth one: A PQI Intelligent Stick.
It fits firmly in the first Flash Drive category. It's very small. It's exceptionally, mind bendingly small. It's only one and five-eighths inches long. It's about as thick as a nickel. If you didn't read the box, you'd mistake it for some obscure type of memory card.
The Intelligent Stick is a flat, rectangular piece of plastic about a sixteenth of an inch thick. It's only one and five-eighths inches long, as I said, and looks rather like what your mind would picture if someone took a normal flash drive, shortened it by about half, and then ran it lengthwise through an egg slicer. It doesn't have the now familiar USB plug built into the end of it; That'd be about three times as thick as the card itself. Instead, it has a patch of fifteen artfully laid out gold contacts on one side. Four of these will neatly match the contacts on the inside of a USB port. The Intelligent Stick doesn't actually utilize an entire USB port - You're meant to just wedge it into the bottom half where the contacts are. The grounding box around the outside of the port isn't used.
It sounds too unlikely to be true, but the concept works, and the Intelligent Stick stays firmly enough inserted in just half of a USB port to work. This is slick, but raises concern; A good vertical whack to the Stick while it's inserted could do considerable violence to your USB port and the Stick itself, since it has none of the usual reinforcement of a full USB plug. Also, I imagine those big exposed contacts are vulnerable to being static zapped, scratched, and otherwise manged. I handle it like I would any memory card - If it isn't in the machine or in transit to or from the machine from the case, it's in said case.
Anything else I could mention about the drive would be exactly like any other USB flash drive out there. You plug it in, Windows picks it up, and you have an instant new drive. The total capacity is only 976 true megabytes, of course, because the packaging takes for granted that a "megabyte" is 1000 kilobytes, and a "gigabyte" is 1000 megabytes (they are not; A true megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, and a true gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, because computers tend to work in powers of two). The drive is USB 2.0 compliant, so it transfers data reasonably quickly. My testing indicated a write speed of 2.37 megabytes per second sustained write (burst writing of small files is even faster - 10 theoretical megs per second, give or take) and an alarming 19.23 megs per second read speed. You can use the drive with a machine with older USB 1.1 ports, of course, but your transfer speeds will be much more pedestrian. A gig a 2.0 speed is tolerable, a gig at 1.1 speed will take an amount of time just long enough to be maddening.
There is no indicator light anywhere on the drive. You get no activity blinkies, so you'll have to take the Unplug or Eject Hardware Wizard's word for it that your files are done writing and won't get thrown on the floor when you unplug the drive. So by all means, do unmount it via the icon in your taskbar (provided you didn't disable it) before you try to yank the drive from its port.
The retail packaging of the Intelligent Stick also includes an adapermajig (technical term) that translates the Stick's contact patch into a standard USB plug, but also increases its overall size to that of an average sized flash drive. This could be useful in situations where you're fumbling around behind a computer for a port, maybe, or if you have a whole stack of Intelligent Sticks and want a slightly less fiddly way to swap them in and out. A natty credit card sized plastic sheath is also included, and will accommodate two intelligent sticks, one in either side. There's the obligatory driver CD, which contains drivers for Windows 95 OEM Release 2 Hyper Turbo Edition (ask for it by name, older versions of Windows 95 don't work with USB) and Windows 98. Newer versions of Windows shouldn't need drivers. The driver CD is a "CD single" size 80mm disk, though, so even it has its novelty value.
One interesting bit is that if you peruse PQI's site (http://www.pqi1st.com/products/istick.asp) you'll notice how they treat the Intelligent Stick an awful lot like a flash memory card - Using the Intelligent Stick in "your digital still camera, PDA, or MP3 player" (excerpt from the above site) makes it sound like multiple uses for the Intelligent Stick are - or were - in the works. It certainly makes one wonder what all those extra contacts are doing on the card, and if they can be utilized for traditional memory card-esque tasks in future devices (or devices planned but never released). PQI, for their part, is playing coy. None of the various gadgets on their site, in production or listed as "coming soon" include Intelligent Stick compatibility.
Interesting.
No matter how you slice it, though, the Intelligent Stick is a fine piece of technology, both in pose value and actual functionality. If you've gotta have the absolute smallest flash drive you can get - And we're not discounting possibilities of people whose occupations involve wearing tuxedoes and infiltrating enemy bases - the Intelligent Stick is where it's at. It's not the most durable option you could lay your hands on, sure, but is it ever cool.
INTELLIGENTSTICK(TM)1GB USB 2.0 COMPLIANT ; SMALLEST FORM FACTOR AS THE THICKNESS IS A MERE 2.8MM; 7 MB MAXIMUM SUSTAINED TRANSFER RATE; DURABLE ; PAR...More at Amazon Marketplace
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