Introduction

Its size resembles a stick of chewing gum, or the size of a typical human thumb, manufactured as a solid-state product using non-volatile Flash Memory. This idea is not totally new, as we first discovered during our visit to Comdex Fall, at the Las Vegas Convention Centre back in 1995. We discovered an add-on card which could be inserted in any ISA slot manufactured using Flash Memory and had 32Mb of storage, which was plenty back in those days, the product was not only excellent in terms of data transfer times, but was also useful for executing large spreadsheets at a blink of an eyelid. The downside? the cost of Flash Memory back in those days was astronomical - and the card was priced at $2700.00, hence it never took off. The ThumbDrive is not entirely the cheapest portable solution around, but the features outweigh the cost limitations. The idea couldn't be simpler: No drive mechanism avoiding crashes, No power supply, No external cables, totally portable, just plug in and it acts like an extra drive when plugged into any available USB port. Currently the ThumbDrive is available in 16Mb, 32Mb, 64Mb, 128Mb and 256Mb; apparently there are plans for larger sizes that in turn are going to be dictated by the future cost of Flash Memory.

How we carried out our tests

We received a 64Mb version of the ThumbDrive and our objective was to test the performance, implementation, stability, and ease of use of the ThumbDrive.

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