Verbatim Store 'n' Go 1 GB U3 Smart Flash Drive 95229 (Silver)

Need a new USB flash drive, and primarily use a Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP system (i.e., don't use Macintosh or Linux)? The Verbatim U3 Smart Drive combines data storage and a portable applications platform into one device, and provides two features that make it immediately worthy of consideration: slick password-protected access to the U3 drive, and auto-run anti-virus.

On Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and above systems, the Verbatim U3 Smart Drive shows up as two drives: a 4-megabyte CD-ROM drive containing the U3 software platform, and a USB data storage device with 927-megabytes of available storage space. When the U3 Smart Drive is inserted into a computer, the CD-ROM portion starts the U3 Launchpad first. When password protection is enabled, the password must be correctly entered to activate the data storage portion of the drive. Otherwise, the computer reports that the data storage portion of the drive is unavailable. Verbatim's U3 Smart Drive comes with McAfee...Read more

What's the data transfer speeds? The benefit of U3 Technology is that they can boot/run software directly from the drive so transfer rates are a really important spec. I want a really fast U3 device on BOTH read and write. As of this date, transfer speeds of U3 drives are so disappointing that drive manufacturers won't show them. The only specs I've found shows that initial drives are only 40x or 6MBs. Current non-U3 speeds are as high as 150x or 22MBs. We need to know read and write speeds before buying!

I love this little thumb drive, I use it every day. Read/write speed is acceptable, even on my ancient P3-600. I compared the transfer rates of the Verbatim vs my Lexar JumpDrive, both took the exact same time to copy a large 500 MB CD image to/from my hard drive. I'm no computer engineer, I bought this drive because of the U3 Launchpad, not because of published transfer rates.

What enthused me about this drive is the U3 Launchpad. USB thumb drives have been around for a few years and, although you can run some applications, it is not always easy. The U3 Launchpad makes it simple to run *my* applications with *my* data on any Windows 2000 or XP PC. U3 puts the *Personal* back in my PC. And the icing on the cake is, when this thumb drive is ejected, the U3 Launchpad cleans out any lingering personal data on the host machine. U3 makes portable, fast, secure, private computing easy.

Although U3 applications are limited as of this writing, software...Read more