LaCie WhizKey 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive 131053

I eagerly awaited receipt of my WhizKey 32GB, but was greatly disappointed by the transfer speeds. Shipping it back for a refund, pronto!

The product is cleverly designed and I loved the capacity, but was so frustrated by its performance that I quickly hated using it.

I tested with a 551MB collection of files ranging from a few KB to 20MB on XP, Vista 32-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit. The best case scenario was on my Win7 machine where it took 90 sec (~6.1 MB/sec) to read from the device and a painstaking 9 MINUTES (~1 MB/sec) to write the same folder to the WhizKey! Those numbers are nowhere near the advertised "up to 30MB/sec" transfer speed--I certainly didn't expect USB 1.1 write speeds! All 3 tested computers are no more than 2 years old and definitely support USB 2.0. Furthermore, I compared it to my 8GB MicroSD Class 6 card with a USB adapter and it wrote 5x faster than the WhizKey.

The design of the WhizKey also presented additional...Read more

I love the key form of this flash drive, but unfortunately it doesn't have the best performance. It is also incompatible with the new Xbox 360 update that allows the use of flash drives - it fails the data loss/performance test.

I love the functionality of this flash drive, plus it looks so cool. I put it on my key chain and have been using it all the time. It comes with a tiny plastic cover for the end which promptly fell off. It seems to work fine without the protective covering - there was no way that little tiny covering was going to stay on in my bag. You don't think it will fit into your USB drive because it's so slim, but it fits perfectly. It comes with a link to some software to back up your stuff online, i already have a backup system, so i won't use that, but i guess it's a nice feature if you need another backup system. Overall, I love the look and size of the flash drive, i show if off to everyone. I would definitely purchase again and probably get a bigger memory.