45 Degrees and It Still Works!
Written: Nov 10 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to use, durable
Cons: Not-so-well designed, capacity isn't really enough for many uses
The Bottom Line: This flash drive would work well for anyone who needs an inexpensive flash drive for transporting documents. I would not recommend this for the transport of any media.
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| noangels's Full Review: SanDisk Cruzer Mini (128 MB) (SDCZ2-128R) |
No, I’m not referring to temperature. This workhorse of a flash drive still works after 2 years of abuse. Allow me to elaborate…
How I came to own this flash drive
I have always been fascinated by flash drives, from the time of their first appearance in retail stores. They became affordable a little late in the game for me. I started seeing them in Best Buy shortly after I realized floppy disks at 1.44 MB capacity just weren’t cutting it. Unfortunately I didn’t know about them before I purchased a $50 external floppy drive and a 10 pack of disks. I’ll save that complaint for another review, another day. Needless to say, my previous challenges with transporting data have made me appreciate the ease of use of flash drives, along with their capacities.
I decided I needed one when I grew tired of emailing myself word documents and MP3s. I purchased the San Disk Cruzer Mini 128 MB USB 2.0 Flash drive, mainly due to brand recognition. I owned San Disk memory cards for my cameras, and had been pleased with them. Price was also a factor because flash drives were not nearly as inexpensive in 2005 as they are now.
Design and Durability
This flash drive is small. It is approximately a little over half of an inch wide, by two inches long, by a quarter of an inch thick. The USB is exposed and three colored caps are provided to protect it. They lock in, to a degree, but I lost all three of them within a few months (though I have periodically found them and re-lost them). If you can hold on to them, they conveniently lock onto the lighted back of the flash drive when in use.
The design is lacking. Over time, the USB bent to a near 45 degree angle from pressure of the rather long drive being pushed up by various objects when plugged into my laptop. It still works, though. After two years, and tons of abuse, it still works. This drive has survived dropping, being thrown in my bag with other more durable objects, being sat on when stuffed in my pocket, and more. Durability is certainly its strong point, especially consider how easily the design allows the drive to be damaged.
This flash drive comes with a lanyard that you can attach to a loop on one of its corners. I found this to be very well designed. I keep the flash drive around my neck and detach it from the lanyard at a small buckle at the bottom. There’s no need to take the lanyard off to use the flash drive.
Ease of Use
This drive didn’t come with software. Just plug it in and play. You can download drivers for older versions of Windows, but I have only used this with Windows XP and Vista. No problems to report with either operating system.
Capacity
This flash drive holds a little under 128 MB (remember, a little bit of the space goes to formatting). This is the equivalent of over 80 floppy disks. It sounds like a lot of space, but with today’s file sizes, I wouldn’t recommend this flash drive to anyone looking to hold more than documents. 128 MB doesn’t even hold 30 pictures from my 6 megapixel digital camera. I recently attempted to transport an album of high quality audio files and ran out of space. I purchased the San Disk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive and have been satisfied with it. I now use the 2 GB (2048 MB) flash drive as my “main” flash drive and the 128 MB as my “throw away” drive. It sits on my desk and gets used for quick document and MP3 transfers, and has a backup of a few important documents on it.
Price
At the time of purchase, I paid $34.99 for this flash drive from Dell.com. It was a good deal back then, but now I’d expect to pay no more than $10-$15 for such capacity. For comparison’s sake, my 2 GB flash drive only set me back $23.99.
Overall Recommendation
This flash drive was well worth its price. I’m impressed it still functions after 2 years of getting thrown around. If you’re looking at it on ebay and hoping to store documents, I highly recommend it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
noangels
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Member: Jamilynn
Location: Staten Island, NY USA
Reviews written: 216
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About Me:
So glad to almost be done with Christmas shopping!
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