-- Trek 16MB Thumbdrive Smart
-- Price: ~ $50.00
USD
-- 07.22.2002
-- By: GideonX
-- Page: 1 2
For the past decade or so, the floppy drive has held a
good dominance over portable storage. With 1.44MBs of storage
on a floppy disk, it was cheap and easy to transport. But
issues about reliability and more importantly size have started to
make the floppy undesirable. Then came along Zip drives, with
a larger capacity, it became popular to an extent. It
failed in that it required you to have a Zip drive to read the Zip
disks. With mechanical parts powering the floppy and Zip
formats, it was common to have corrupt data and failures.
With that in mind, a newer portable format was
definitely needed. A common interface that most modern
machines have is the USB ports. They are used on PCs and on
Macs and have the speed to replace the floppy and the convenience to
oust the Zip drive.
Some companies developed a few of these USB portable
drives and came up with a small keychain sized device. One of
the major players, is the Trek
Thumbdrive Smart. Trek is located in the middle of Silicon
Valley in California. Not large in operation, but they do
specialize in portable storage. I'll be taking a look at
their 16MB version of their flagship Thumbdrive device.
Here are some specs on the portable drive from
Trek's website:
| Interface |
USB
Specification 1.1 |
| Memory |
8MB / 16MB / 32MB /
64MB / 128MB |
| Dimensions |
64mm(L)
x 18mm(W) x 8mm(H) |
| Weight |
12g |
| Data
Transfer speed |
Read
Operation: 700 Kbytes/s
Write Operation: 350 Kbytes/s |
| Power supply |
USB
bus-powered |
| LED
indication |
Solid:
Thumbdrive connected
Blinking: Data transmitting and receiving |
| Operating
Temperature |
0oC
~ 50oC |
| Storage
Temperature |
-20oC
~ 80oC |
Some of the best features of this drive
is the ability to use this on pretty much any USB enabled
computer. All Windows OSes are supported except for Win95 and
NT. What also is good about this, is that no drivers are
needed on WinMe, 2000 and XP. With Windows 98/SE, a simple
driver installation will get this drive working for you. There
is also support on the Mac under OS 8.6, 9.x or 10.x.
Another selling point about USB drives
is that it's a solid state drive, meaning no moving parts. If
you've used floppies before, you probably have experienced the crazy
click of death. That happened quite a few times, where my
floppy disks just decided to want to be formatted even though
there's data on it. But just like locking notches on floppies,
the Thumbdrive also has one. It lets you set a switch on the
bottom to prevent overwriting your own data. A nice feature to
have for that just in case scenerio.
The packaging is pretty simple, you have
the drive itself, driver disc and warranty card. There are no
printed instructions, just the instructions on the cdrom. You can
also find PDF instructions on the Thumbdrive itself.
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