EasyDisk 128MB USB Drive Review

 

Yet another USB drive review here at Modsynergy.com. What makes this one different? This one we are looking at today comes from a company called EasyDisk. Let’s see if our 128MB version can top out the competition.

The EasyDisk 128MB USB Drive came packaged in a FedEx envelope and was securely packaged with bubble wrapping. There were no damages made.

The unit comes in a nicely designed box with all necessary hardware and accessories. What you receive when you purchase the EasyDisk 128MB USB drive are:

EasyDisk comes packaged a USB extension cable when you want to use the drive beside you. A nice addition to say the least.  The product comes with a small sized CD with drivers for Windows 98. So it is not entirely driverless as the DiskOnKey we reviewed. This CD also includes two programs; Mformat and PassID. These two programs can format the USB drive and use a password for security purposes. Furthermore in the Mformat program, you can format the USB drive as a bootable disk. The programs are very basic yet still work as advertised.

The unit has a usable storage of 124MB because of these programs taking up space.

The small manual was easy and clear to read. It goes over how to install the drivers if you are using Windows 98, and how to use the EasyDisk USB drive generally speaking.

Specs

As you can see by the specs, the EasyDisk is USB 1.1 based and does not fully utilize USB 2.0. The drive will suffer from transfer rates and read rates because of this.

The drive is very small and compact. It sports a plain black color and uses rubber as its material of choice. This can be a bad thing because it picks up dust quite easily. On the flip side, the advantage of rubber is the grip it gives you to hold on to it at all circumstances.  Located on the profile, we have a switch. This switch is a write-protection feature such as floppies has. If you do not want people saving things to your drive, just simply switch it on.

512MB version shown.  No different than 128MB version.

Write-protection switch

Testing

As this unit is 128MB, I will be able to use Sisoft Sandra 2003 to benchmark the drive. The test is conducted on the usual specs of an AMD XP 1900+, and Abit NV7-133R (Full USB 2.0 support).

Here is the end result.

893KB/S is not bad at all for USB 1.1

The read speeds and write speeds were close to the specs. They were a few (7-15 KB/S off).

To give you a real look of how it stacks up to the drives we already looked at. I will transfer 15MB worth of data to the drives and record the approximate time.

DiskOnKey Pro: 14.5 seconds

JMTek USBDrive Professional: 21 seconds

EasyDisk 128MB Drive: 18.5 seconds

The results speak for themselves. The EasyDisk comes in second. What I did not understand was why the EasyDisk beat out the JMTek while the JMTek drive had a “claimed” faster write speed…I re-tested it and came out with close to the same results. Interesting…

Conclusion

The EasyDisk is a great little product. Not only was it quick for it's stature, the EasyDisk came with a good bundle. The free extension cable will be handy for some and the write-protection switch on the profile of the product is a nice addition that some others do not have

Two problems were the lack of USB 2.0 support, and that the drive picked up dust easily.

Overall, it’s a good choice if you are looking for a portable USB drive.

I rate it a…

9/10!

Pros and Cons

+ Light
+ Write-protection switch and capable of a boot-disk
+ Good speed for USB 1.1
+ Extension cable
- Not USB 2.0
- Rubber material picks up dust, etc.
- Software makes it not fully 128MB

Let me thank EasyDisk for making the review possible. Visit the newly renovated www.easydisk.com for more info.

Pricing