Date: July 20th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Crucial
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PRODUCT USE & BENCHMARKING

Through this section you will see how this product is used and performs.

You have to watch Crucial's wording on their website about this product. They claim it to be a USB 2.0/1.1 "compliant" which in this drive's case means that it will work in a USB 2.0 port because the USB standard is backwards compatible, but it won't transfer at those particular speeds.

All that is needed to use this drive is to pop it into your closest USB port and if you are using Windows XP/2000/NT, it will practically set itself up. If you are using Windows 98SE, you will have to take a trip to the Windows Update site to find the drivers. After everything is setup, the drive performs just like any harddrive on your computer.

I wondered what actual transfer rate the drive was capable of so I fired up SiSoft Sandra 2002 Professional and ran a quick benchmark.

With a throughput of about one megabyte per second, this drive performs like a USB 1.0 device. Anyone in the market for a device such as this should be aware of the difference between "compliant" and "actual". To a certain extent, I am a little disappointed in Crucial's fuzzy wording around the actual specifications of this drive and this could lead to some unhappy customers.