Date: July 30th, 2010
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Patriot
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING (cont'd)
After setting up a password, a confirmation screen lets you know that the drive will now become locked if it's removed from the PC or if no power is getting to it.
To unlock the drive and access the contents, simply press the unlock button, enter the password and your files will then be accessible.
You have nine chances to enter in the correct password before this message appears. If the tenth attempt at entering the password fails, the entire drive will be formatted and the contents lost. Be sure to remember your password!
To test the performance of the Bolt, I copied a DVD .iso file that is 4.35GB in size to the flash drive and then back to my PC. The time it took to transfer the file each way was recorded to give an example of what to expect from this drive under real world conditions. The test PC is running Windows XP SP3.
Before beginning, I transferred the .iso file between two SATA drives in the test PC. It took 1 minute, 38 seconds. Let's see how that compares to the Bolt flash drive:
4.35GB File Transfer (USB 2.0)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to USB drive |
4:39 |
Read from USB drive |
2:22 |
The fact that this drive uses encryption didn't slow down file transfers at all. The Bolt performed just as well as any other USB 2.0 flash drive I've used, with read speeds being especially impressive. Good performance is definitely a plus, and it's also good to know that the files on it are protected using strong encryption that is next to impossible to break.
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