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A-Data 2 GB Fingerprint Drive (FD1)


Date
: 07/30/06 – 06:47:57 AM

Author
:

Category
: Storage

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer:
A-Data

Price:
$120

The convenience that USB flash drives provide tends to make them the home for a vast variety of data. Some people carry USB flash drives for everyday usage, while others use them to store sensitive, personal or confidential data; however, despite the usage, everyone tends to misplace them. At this point it should be quite obvious that losing the USB drive spells trouble, especially if sensitive data is stored on it. But, fear no longer as A-Data's Fingerprint series USB flash drives with bio-verification technology has arrived! Though this wont help one find or prevent losing a USB drive, at least the data will be secure.

A-Data is a rapidly growing company who opened its doors five years ago with a mere 20 employees. Based on their corporate values of integrity, fairness, honesty, perseverance, ingenuity, harmony, love and innovation, A-Data soared into the DRAM module market. Today, A-Data is among one of the largest producer of memory and memory related products in the world.

Page 2 : Package and Package Contents

The A-Data Fingerprint drive ships in a clear sealed clam shell style package. This type of packaging is great for displaying the product, but does a mediocre job protecting the contents within. The cardboard backing advertises some main features which we will get into later on in the specifications section.

The bottom portion on the back of the package displays more in depth features and specifications in nine different languages.

Removing the contents from the sealed clam shell style package reveals the A-Data 2GB Fingerprint drive, a fancy looking USB extension cable and a driver disk.

The A-Data Fingerprint drive itself is a glossy white rectangular device with chamfered edges.

The back of the drive sports two holes for a lanyard or similar attachment – neither is included.

At this point those of you who have been carefully viewing the pictures are probably wondering where the USB plug and fingerprint reader is, A-Data has designed this USB drive with a cover-like piece which protects both the fingerprint reader and USB connector while making the USB drive look pretty damn cool!

Simply pull apart the two pieces and the drive is ready for use.

The actual fingerprint reader is extruded inwards from the body of the drive in order to lower the chances of damage to the sensor.

Now, head on over to the next section and we will take a look at the installation process.

Page 3 : Specifications

Here is what A-Data has to say about their Fingerprint USB drive:

It looks like A-Data has really put together a nice bundle! One of my very first concerns was: what would happen if the finger sweep sensor broke? Well it looks like A-Data has already addressed this with a life time warranty!

Page 4 : Installation

Now normally, installing a USB device is as easy as plug and play, but the A-Data Fingerprint drive is not your typical USB device. Of course, the first step is to plug it into the computer. In order to make use of the fingerprint reader it would be ideal to utilize the front USB ports, but the Fingerprint drive may physically block other USB ports depending on the orientation.

This problem can be solved by simply using the included USB extension cable.

After the drive is attached to the computer and is recognized, a window named Fingerprint Registration will auto run prompting the user to configure security settings. The Fingerprint drive stores up to ten fingers which comes in handy if the drive is meant to be shared among multiple people each requiring access to the drive. If the drive is intended to be used for a single person, it may be a good idea to store more than one fingerprint just incase that finger becomes unreadable. To begin, click the desired finger and hit next. A backup password may also be set.

At this point another screen should appear prompting the user to slide their finger over the sensor. The application requires the user to repeat this process multiple times in order to verify the accuracy of the reading.

In my case this process took eight tries.

Once complete, the user is brought back the main fingerprint registration screen where the user can choose to store another fingerprint or delete an existing fingerprint.

Next, the user may choose to store a password.

Now that the drive is ready to be used, hit next and we shall take a look at some features!

With the drive setup, plugging in the drive now brings up a verification screen.

The user can choose to verify with a fingerprint or password.

The drive may not be accessed until either the entered fingerprint or password matches the verification stored on the drive.

At this point, a window named Home will pop up. This menu auto runs off the USB drive and allows the user to store passwords, favorite websites, check email change settings, browse the drive or read help files. Unfortunately for those of us who use Opera, Firefox, Safari, K-Mellon or any other alternative browser the auto login feature only works for the Internet Explorer browser.

Now, for the real test of the drive's worth, head on to the next page for performance numbers!

Page 5 : Performance

Testing will be run on the following setup:

In order to ensure accuracy and consistency all drives will be formatted twice before tests are run. Benchmarks run will include both real world and synthetic tests to provide a wide scope in order to accurately evaluate the results. Tests will include DiskBench, HD Tach RW, ATTO Disk Bench, SiS Sandra, HD Tune and as always, IoZone.

First we will begin with some straight forward tests in order to get a general idea of the read and write speeds of this drive.

HD Tach

HD Tach is an excellent utility for giving an easy to read general overview of performance for a drive.

Throughout the duration of the test, the sequential read speed held steady at around 9.5 MB/s and write speed stayed just below 7 MB/s. These numbers were a bit disappointing, and by all measures this drive is slow.

HD Tune

HD Tune scores are usually lower than other benchmarks because HD Tune measures 1 MB as 1 048 576 bytes or 1024 KB while other benchmarks such as HD Tach and Atto measure 1 MB as 1 000 000 bytes or 1000 KB.

The discrepancy between the CPU usage and access time may be caused by different testing methods, but either way these numbers are fairly good.

Atto Disk Benchmark

Next up is Atto, a traditional benchmark used to test RAID setups but it also does an excellent job testing removable storage devices.

These results are consistent with the HD Tach scores, and again are not exactly impressive.

Page 6 : Performance Part Two

For the next set of tests we will be comparing how the A-Data Fingerprint USB drive compares against a few competitors. We will begin with SiS Sandra.

DiskBench

We will begin this section with DiskBench, a real world benchmark which measures the time it takes to perform tasks such as reading or copying a file.

Unfortunately as expected, the A-Data Fingerprint drive trailed behind in each test. But, in all fairness the competitors are high performance USB devices. Though the A-Data drive trailed behind according to these graphs, in comparison to the majority of USB drives available, these numbers are not too bad.

Sisoft Sandra

To finish off this section we will conclude with Sisoft Sandra, a famed benchmark system and for good reason too!

Again we see the A-Data Fingerprint drive trail behind the competitors in a vast majority of testing areas except for average access time and random write speed.

Page 7 : Conclusion

The A-Data Fingerprint USB drive is a mixed bag full of strengths, weaknesses and disappointments. The concept of the security feature is awesome but the implementation could use some work. One of the greatest downfalls is that the Fingerprint drive requires software to initialize in order for the security verification application to run. Unfortunately such a system does not work on a vast majority of public computers where one may choose to use such a device. Another point of interest is the slow transfer speed. This is understandable if the Fingerprint drive was a low capacity USB drive, but for a drive whose models range from 256 MB to 2 GB, it is safe to assume that users will want to occupy the storage capacity with large files.

Overall, the A-Data Fingerprint drive is one of those love it or hate it products. If the features satisfy your needs it is a miracle product, but for the rest who are in need of a conventional USB drive with a touch of security a standard USB drive and software encryption will better suit the role.

Advantages

Very attractive
Provides security for private data
Low price

Disadvantages

Slow transfer rate
Not usable in restricted computer systems

Overclockers Online would like to thank Brando Workshop for making this review possible.