SimpleTech Bonzai Xpress 2 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive, Designed By Pininfarina

Comment: I've now owned this flash drive for over 2 years and haven't had any problems. Primary use is transfering docs/music to and from work and taking data with me on business trips.

Pros: Haven't had any problem with corrupt/losing data. Easy plug and play with every computer I've ever tried it with. Nice design. Total disk space on mine is 1.94gb. Speed seems good (transferred 1gb of mp3s from hard drive to device in 20-25 secs).

Cons: Nothing really. Blue light is very bright but that's not really a con unless you are trying to sleep on your laptop. The cap would be easy to lose b/c it's not attached but by some higher power I've been able to keep track of mine for 2+ yrs and counting.

I would recommend this product to a friend.

Comment: This USB is really slow for it's proposed USB 2.0. However, I bought it for $15 so I can't complain; the 2gb storage is stable and it works great.

I recently bought a $8 Cruzer 2GB micro and it's blazingly fast compared to this usb. I will be using that one more from now on.

One interesting thing to note is that this USB was actually really fast on a certain Dell computer at my school--I have no idea what made it compatible with that PC only. So this may be a compatibility issue (Euro/US?)

The design is definitely pretty though; it has a sleek, flat elegance that makes it nice to look at. If time isn't a concern to you, then this may be the USB for you.

Comment: Mine died with no warning after using it for a few weeks. I didn't notice speed issues.

Now the pretty blue light comes on and blinks, but system properties show 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free. Will not format.

Comment: bonsai [noun]: "A small decorative evergreen shrub or tree grown in a pot, which has been prevented from growing to its usual size by various methods."

The description above is very indicative of why SimpleTech chose the name for this drive that they have. It is diminutive, decorative, and performs at about the same speed as a tree grows! I can't stress this enough. I did some performance comparisons writing 100 MB of data to this drive and other media. Everything I tested smoked this drive in write tests. The closest the BonzaiXpress came to was a CD-RW at 4X speed. If you've ever used a CD-RW you know how slow they are; and yet the CD-RW was TWICE as fast as this drive.

I attempted to format the drive today (so that I could give it away) and it died. This drive is so slow that I rarely ever used it and yet it has already malfunctioned. Maybe the length of life and the performance issues are related. Mine is now being recycled and that's about the best thing I can say about this drive.

Comment: I bought this drive on sale from another vendor. It was PAINFUL to use. It was about as fast as a floppy. A 1mb file took nearly 20 seconds to be transferred! Don't bother with it. Stick to another brand.

A friend of mine also had exactly the same problem. He exchanged one and told me that the second one was OK. So apparently it could be a hit-and-miss thing. However, it just seemed to me that the probability of missing is so high that it is not worth considering.

I'm going to buy a Sandisk.