USB Drives are an extremely popular
means of transporting our data with us, be it files, movies or music,
we have a need to take stuff with us and these products allow us a
quick and portable means to do this. While most USB drives are fairly
small, some are smaller than others, it’s almost as if some companies
are trying to make the smallest possible USB drive. This is good for
the consumer though as we take quite a bit of stuff with us
everywhere we go as is, so smaller makes things more portable and
easier to take with us.
Today for review I’ve got a bit of
bling for you, we all like gold, no matter guy or girl, gold is
something that signifies money, power and status in our society and
has for many centuries, so how about a 24k gold plated USB drive?
Super Talent has come out with a special version of their very
popular Pico-C USB drive, this time they’ve gold plated it with 24
karat gold to add a bit of class and style to this already excellent
and popular product. The Pico-C Gold is so small and looks so good
that you could possibly wear it as a charm on a necklace or even a
bracelet. Included with the Pico-C Gold is also a strong gold chain
that can be used to attach the Pico-C to your keychain, phone or
anywhere else you wish to. While the Pico-C does look good, looks
aren’t everything as we know, so I’ve put the Pico-C up against a few
other popular USB drives on the market today from ATP, OCZ and Super
Talents own as well.
So continue on to learn more about this
tiny UBS drive and see how it compares out others out there today…
Super
Talent Pico-C 8gb 24K Gold USB Drive
Author: Kristofer Brozio
Sponsor: Super Talent
Tech
Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Super
Talent Pico C 8gb 24K Gold USB Drive
8GB Pico C Gold
STU8GPCG
24-carat gold plating on the
world’s smallest 8GB USB Drive…plus 200X speed, water resistance,
and a strong gold chain. WOW!
Pico Series USB drives are
incredibly small and stylish flash drives offering up to 8GB data
storage. Pico drives feature up to 30 MB/s transfer speeds.
Measuring merely 1.50″x0.50″, not only are Pico drives
ideal for transporting data, digital images, and presentations, they
are also the perfect accessory to adorn keychains, mobile phones, or
wearing as a necklace.
Super Talent’s patented PICO
USB drives pack huge capacites into a tiny case. Half the size of an
SD card, each PICO drive is smaller than the plug at the end of a USB
cable! But tiny does not have to mean fragile or slow.
Encased in a sleek and solid
metal housing, no-compromise PICO drives are shock- and
water-resistant to hold up under harsh conditions. And we didn’t
forget to include zippy 200x transfer speeds.
Specs:
Capacities: 1GB – 8GB
Dimension: 31.3mm x 12.4mm x
3.4mm
Technical
Details:
-Weight less than 6g
-Up to 30MB/s (200X) data
transfer rate
-Fully compatible with USB 2.0
and 1.1
-Powered by USB bus – no
external power is required
-Durable solid-state storage –
10 years data retention
-Hot Plug & Play – enable
you to install and uninstall Pico anytime
Pico
Models:
PICO-A: Swivel, water resistant
PICO-B: Retractable
PICO-C: Water resistant, rugged
Pico drives are available in
capacities ranging from 1GB to 8GB.
Protected by US patents #
6,547,130; 7,257,714 and 7,103,684.
Browser
Support:
Windows: Windows 98 and above
Mac: Mac 10.x and above
Approximate
storage capacity for 8gb Pico-C:
Photos JPEG (6 Megapixels):
2,688 photos
Music MP3 (128 kbps): 1,920
songs
Video MPEG-4 (384kbps-15fps):
35 hours
Price:
$35.99 at time of review from NewEgg.com
{mospagebreak title=A Better Look at things}
A
Better Look at Things:
The Super Talent Pico-C Gold comes
in a classy black box with metallic gold trim, it’s a presentation
style box that flips open to show the Pico-C gold in all it’s shiny
glory. Of course we have specs and features listed as well inside and
outside of the box.
Opening the box we find another
plastic box that houses the Pico-C Gold and it’s accessories that
include a gold chain and nylon string fastener.
The Pico-C comes with a protective
plastic coating on the front over the Super Talent logo, it can
easily be peeled off though, the back of the Pico-C is just plain
gold. It really is a small device, about the size of a quarter, and a
little bit thicker. It’s actually heavy for its size, I was very
surprised by the weight of it.
Installation,
Testing and Comparison:
For comparison I’ve put the Super
Talent Pico-C Gold up against four other USB drives that I’ve got on
hand:
Super Talent DH Series 200X (4gig) (review
HERE)
OCZ ATV Turbo (4gig) (review HERE)
OCZ Rally2 Turbo (4gig) (review
HERE)
ATP Toughdrive (1gig)
In the first set of tests I’m
using Diskbench to see the time it takes to Read from, Copy to and
Copy from each drive. The file I used for all testing is an AVI video
file that is 349mb in size. Of course the less time it takes for each
operation the better. I used the same USB port for all testing as
well to make sure the results were comparable, each test was run
three times and averaged out as well.
We can see the Pico-C Gold lacks
in the Copy To area for some reason but the other tests are
comparable to the other drives I’ve got on hand.
This next set of tests is actually
the second part of the Diskbench testing, here we can see the
transfer rates in MB/s for the tests in the above graph. Here of
course higher is better.
Here we see why the Pico-C Gold
lagged behind in the ‘Copy To’ testing, it’s only averaging about 10
MB/s transfer speed. I actually ran the ‘Copy To’ test on the Pico-C
Gold 9 times because I was very surprised at the results, I really
expected much better performance from it.
And the final test on these USB
drives is using SiSoft Sandra XI SP3 Removable Storage Benchmark.
Here again the higher the scores the better.
Super
Talents own USB drive takes the lead in this set of tests, with the
Super Talent Pico-C coming in 4th place for the Combined Index results but coming in first for the
Endurance Factor meaning that the Pico-C has a higher expected
lifetime than all the other drives.
Overall the Pico-C Gold is not a
bad little USB drive, but as I said I was very surprised by the low
times and transfer rates when copying to the drive
Just a note, all of the drives
were formatted before testing using FAT32 file system, but out of
curiosity since I was using Vista I decided to see if the new exFAT
file system made any differences with the transfer times on the
Pico-C Gold USB drive. Remember though, exFAT is only for Vista at
the present time, I’ve read though where people have gotten XP to be
able to read exFAT formatted drives but not write to them.
I also tried NTFS as well to see
what happens there with transfer rates and times.
NTFS:
Copy to Time: 46.3 Seconds
Copy to xfer rate: 7.55Mb/s
exFAT:
Copy to Time: 33.3 Seconds
Copy to xfer rate: 10.51Mb/s
Well we don’t see much of a
difference when switching the file systems, we did gain about 3
seconds while using the exFAT system, but those 3 seconds aren’t
worth it when you lose the compatibility of Windows XP in the
process. We also see that the NTFS file system is actually worse when
it comes to a USB drive…
Just an observation, but I did
noticed that the Pico-C does get fairly warm when you’re using it, I
guess considering it’s metal this will happen…
Summary and Comments
The Super Talent Pico-C Gold USB
drive is a great little product offering water resistance, durability
and a very classy look so you can take your data with you in style.
The slow transfer rates though are
a bit of a letdown, but personally I’m not in that much of a hurry so
they don’t bother me too much, those who desire the fastest of the
fast might want to consider one of the other drives I’ve tested today
including Super Talents own product.
…but if you’re looking for a USB
drive that offers the ultimate in portability, reliability and style
then the Pico-C Gold might just be for you…
Overall it’s a great little USB
drive that will be traveling with me where I go, and despite the
slower than average transfer rates I can still recommend it to anyone
looking for an ultra portable flash drive that will protect your data
from the weather and pretty much whatever else you can throw at it…
DragonSteelMods gives the Pico-C
Gold USB Drive a 4.5 out of 5 score and our Recommended Award as
well.
Pros:
-Very, very small size
-Rugged
-Water resistant
-Well made
-Looks cool
Cons:
-A bit slow when copying to the
drive
-Picks up dust and fingerprints
very easily
I would like to thank Super Talent for the chance to review the Pico-C Gold USB Drive and for their
continued support of DSM.
review# 471