Super Talent Pico C 8GB Flash Drive
Jul 31st, 2008 | By Nivedh
Super Talent Pico C 8GB Flash Drive
Date
: 08/1/08 – 01:00:20 AM
Author
:
Category
: Storage
Page 1 : Index
Manufacturer:
Super Talent Technology
Super Talent is an American company, based in San Jose, CA, that specializes in memory technology. In fact, their motto is ‘The Best Memory’. They produce everything from RAM modules to SSD drives to USB flash drives. We will be looking at one of the latter in this review.
USB flash drives have been getting smaller and smaller. Super Talent's aptly named new 8 GB
Pico-C
is the smallest in the Pico series, and one of the smallest in the world.
Page 2 : Package, Features & Specifications
I'm a fan of simple packaging that gets the messages across and shifts the focus to the actual product. Super Talent has gone with such a design. Only the bare minimums are present. The 8 GB capacity is displayed prominently. One side of the drive itself is visible, as well as the chain attachment.
The back is equally devoid of much information and the product's name makes its first appearance with the UPC barcode.
Super Talent's webpage for the Pico series has a great deal of information about the drives. The cap-less Pico-C is the smallest of the bunch.
Pico Series USB drives are incredibly small and stylish flash drives offering up to 8GB data storage. Pico drives feature up to 30 MB/s (200X) transfer speeds. Measuring merely 1.50′x0.50′ and weighing less than 5g, not only are Pico drives ideal for transporting data, digital images, and presentations, they are also the perfect accessory to adorn keychains, mobile phones, or wearing as a necklace.
Super Talent's patented PICO USB drives pack huge capacities into a tiny case. Half the size of an SD card, each PICO drive is smaller than the plug at the end of a USB cable! But tiny does not have to mean fragile or slow. Encased in a sleek and solid metal housing, no-compromise PICO drives are shock- and water-resistant to hold up under harsh conditions. And we didn't forget to include zippy 200x transfer speeds.
With dimensions of 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm, the water-resistant Pico-C is tiny!
Page 3 : The Drive & Setup
The first thing you will notice about the Pico-C is its small size. The four distinctive USB connectors take up a good amount of space on this side of the drive. Also, Super Talent's logo interrupts the mirror finish, which is somewhat hard to photograph and thus, the pictures do not do it much justice.
The other side has no features. The side of the drive has a hook to allow attachment of the included chain.
Apart from its small size, the second thing that struck me about the Pico-C was its brilliant mirror finish.
The drive is not very thick, perhaps the thickness of two quarters stacked up.
All in all, the Super Talent Pico-C is very aesthetically pleasing.
When it comes to installation, the Pico-C is truly plug and play since there is no fancy software to install. Just plug it in to a USB port and it's good to go.
Here it is plugged into a USB 2.0 port on my Dell XPS m1330 laptop.
This immediately brings up the AutoPlay window.
The drive shows up as having 7.51 GB of space.
Page 4 : Testing & Performance
Testing will involve both synthetic and ‘real-world’ benchmarks to analyze the performance of the Super Talent Pico-C 8 GB.
HD Tach
First up, the HD Tach tests.
The results show an average read speed of 23.2 MB/s and a burst speed of 27.1 MB/s, which are both respectable. Random access time was 4.3 ms.
HD Tune
HD Tune shows similar results although the burst speed was somewhat low.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
ATTO shows a read speed consistent with HD Tach and HD Tune. Write speeds went up a little bit, to 7.6 MB/s, after increasing the total file size to its maximum value.
DiskBench
Using DiskBench, I generated and used two files, one 100 MB and the other 500 MB, to measure copy, write, and read speeds.
Write speeds are seen to be sluggish.
SiSoft Sandra
The Sandra Removable Storage benchmark shows a combined index of 1243 operations/min, somewhat low because of the drive's low write speeds. However, the endurance factor is high.
The general drive index is 21.54 MB/s, which is alright but would be much higher if it weren't for the low write speeds.
Page 5 : Conclusion
Perhaps the most important asset of the Super Talent Pico-C is its tiny form factor combined with its large capacity of 8 GB. Read performance was up to par with other drives. In terms of build quality and looks, the flash-based USB drive is very solid and sleek, although susceptible to fingerprints. It is also waterproof, which is a great thing.
The drive is not without its faults, however. The read performance is great but I wish I could say the same about the write speeds, which were disappointing. A small addition I would have liked would be a small LED to show when the drive is in use.
If size and aesthetics are important to you, seriously consider the Pico-C. However, if performance is important, look elsewhere because maximum write speeds of 7 MB/s are not going to cut it for an 8GB device.
Advantages:
- Large capacity combined with a durable and sleek form factor
- Good read performance
- Inexpensive
Disadvantages:
- Sluggish write speed performance
Overclockers Online would like to thank Super Talent for providing a review sample of the Pico-C.