SanDisk Cruzer Edge
As someone who's famous for finding lost objects, I know that a portable technology has spread to the masses when I find one in the street out walking, or cycling. First CD? Lafayette, Louisiana, 1992. First cell phone? Tyler, Texas, 1995. And first flash drive: Urbana, Illinois, 2005.
It's most unlikely that my first was a gigabyte drive; it was probably a 128- or 256-megabyte device -- those were the days when 250-GB hard drives were considered huge. We've come a long way: a quick search of my desk and laptop bag turned up six flash drives, ranging from 1 to 32 gigabytes. My most recent acquisition is a brand new 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge I picked up for maybe five bucks. I'm not sure, though, that it was worth the fin.
The Cruzer comes in a monster blister pack to make it harder to steal. Unfortunately, it's also harder to feel. Once I pried it loose, I found that that the edge is a super lightweight two-tone all-plastic case. It's less than 2" long and ¾" wide weighing in at some 5g (1/6 ounce). The business end slides out of the case for insertion into a USB port. Unlike beefier USB drives, the male end is just an open plastic "tray" exposing the four metal contacts. If you're not careful, plugging it into the port slides the works back into the case. There's a little hole at one end of the body, probably so you can carry it on a keychain. The drive looks and feels like it could be broken by a strong sneeze.
| For inexpensive flash memory, the Edge has pretty fast read-write speed. I couldn't find official numbers from SanDisk, but according to a freeware utility (CheckFlash), the 8GB version has a write speed of 12.5 - 12.9 MBps and a read speed of 23.4 - 23.8 MBps on a USB 2.0 port under Windows 7. That compares favorably to my older and/or cheaper drives (writing to freebies from trade shows crawls along at less than 4 MBps). High-end, more expensive drives have faster read speeds of over 30 MBps and write speeds of as much as 20 MBps (other capacities of the Edge, in particular the 4GB size, are said to have much slower write speed). The Edge is compatible with USB 2.0 and backwards compatible to USB 1, but is not USB 3.0-compliant. The Edge is available in 2-, 4-, 8-, 16- and 32-GB capacity and a variety of colors. |
Like all flash drives, the nominal 8 GB size is in reality 8 billion bytes (about 7.5 gigabytes). Perhaps half a megabyte is taken up by files associated with SanDisk's offer of a free, password-protected "vault" with their SecureAccess software and a couple of gigs of free cloud storage space with a service called YuuWaa. The encrypted vault file can only be accessed from CPUs containing a downloaded executable; registration is required for both the vault and the backup.
Technically, the Cruzer Edge is a moderately fast flash drive in a reasonably-priced package, considering its capacity. Physically, however, it's a flimsy design that is rather inconvenient to plug and unplug because of its all-plastic case and slider design. No way I'd try to keep this thing on a keychain, handy little hole or not.
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