Introduction

Floppy disks are dead – long live flash drives. We’ve all known that the days of the floppy disk have been numbered. In fact the only real reason for anyone to have a floppy drive these days is the insistence of motherboard manufacturers to use a boot disk to flash motherboard BIOS’s. Yes there are still some out there who use floppy disks to transfer files with, but all told, these disks just don’t have the capacity nor the durability that people need. Enter flash drives. These little devices have been all the rage over the last few years as people have realized that they can carry megabytes of data in a small compact form factor. Attach it to your keychain or put it around your neck – these little bad boys can carry a great deal of data. I’ve been looking for a flash drive for some time and recently visited Crucial’s website. As a result, I decided to take the dive and get the Crucial Gizmo! 256MB USB Flash Drive. Crucial is a relative late comer to the flash drive market but with the Gizmo!, they hope to make up for lost ground.

Packaging

The Crucial Gizmo! USB Flash Drive was sent in a small cardboard box via FedEx. The box has just enough room to hold the drive and various accessories. Everything was nicely enclosed in bubble wrap. Here are some pictures of the packaging.

Specifications

Each Gizmo! USB Flash Drive comes with a:
- Three Foot USB Extension cable
- Wrist Lanyard (strap)
- Multilingual User Guide

The Gizmo! Supports the following operating systems:
- Windows ME/2000/XP
- Windows 98/SE with drivers
- Mac OS 8.6 9.1, 9.2 and above

Usage

The Crucial Gizmo! comes in a white/grey design and is encased in solid plastic You can attach a wrist strap so you won’t lose the drive when you take it out or you can always find a way to attach the device to your keychain. The USB drive has a cap that you need to take off to reveal the USB interface.

Front of the Gizmo!	Cap removed

Back of the Gizmo!

The Crucial Gizmo! is utterly simple to use. Just plug it into an available USB port and then wait until the OS recognizes the new device. If you are using Windows 98/SE, then you will need to install drivers to support the USB device. However, users of more modern OS’s should have no problems with plugging in the Gizmo!.

The Gizmo comes with a nice three foot extension cord that lets you plug the drive into a system without actually inserting the drive directly into the box. There are times where the USB ports can be a fairly cramped area and there would be no way the Gizmo! would fit into the slot. The cord allows you to connect the drive from a short distance away.

You can connect via a cord	or directly to the USB port

Corded Connection	A closeup at the connection

Once the drive is recognized, Windows will assign a new drive letter and you can start to copying files to and from the device. Here is a picture of the Windows XP Device Mgr with the Gizmo! attached.

Here's a picture of Windows Explorer with the drive mounted.

Here's how much drive space is reported by Windows

 

If any of you are concerned about securing the files on your Gizmo! Drive – Crucial bundles a software application called Secure-D. The entire setup is found on the flash drive and can be installed directly from it. Secure-D works by setting up two zones on your flash drive – a public zone and a private zone. By default, the entire allocation of disk space is given to the public zone. You can configure this allocation by using a slide bar within the Configure tab.

 

Be careful though – if you choose to privatize a portion (or all) of your flash drive, you will lose everything on your flash drive – including the Secure-D setup application. This happens because the entire drive is repartitioned when you reconfigure the zones – thus all the files on the disk are lost. If you plan on accessing your private files on other machines, you will need to make sure you have a copy of Secure-D installed on that system as well. Hence it’s in your best interest to back up the Secure-D installation file. I was not able to find the Secure-D application on the Crucial website.

Installing the application is straightforward. Once the installation is done, you can set a password associated to the device. This password will gain you access to both the private zone of the Gizmo! as well as the ability to change the drives’ configuration.

You can use the application to see your Private Zone. By default, the Public Zone shows up whenever the drive is connected to your PC via the USB port. If you choose to see the Private Zone, then the drive reference within Windows Explorer will now point to the Private Zone.

The Crucial Gizmo! USB Flash Drive is a USB 2.0 and 1.1 compatible device. It does not support Hi-Speed USB throughput speeds which are up in the range of 480Mbps. It would have been nice if the Gizmo! did support Hi-Speed USB speeds but it’s not like I need to run videos off of my drive. As a device to strictly transfer files with, the Gizmo! is more than sufficient. Here are benchmarks taken with Sandra Professional 2003. I used the Gizmo! on two different systems just to make sure that the transfer speeds were comparable. For comparisons, the drive index of a Western Digital 120GB 7200 drive is included.

Summary

The Crucial Gizmo! 256 MB USB Flash Drive is a good introductory product from Crucial Technology. Though somewhat late to the game, the Gizmo! offers decent performance in a well constructed device. Perhaps the most attractive feature of the 256MB device is the pricing of the flash drive. At around $80 dollars, this drive is a bargain when compared to many other flash drives in the market. The bundled security application could be better. It would have been nice if the security application was included on a separate CD as opposed to being on the flash drive itself. However, all told, this a good choice for anyone needing a way to transfer large files from one system to another without using conventional methods. If you have any comments or questions, please post them in our forums.

Cons:
Secure-D application not on CD and needs to be installed on every machine to use security features
No High-Speed USB throughput support