Computer Reviews

Flash drives have become very popular because of their flexible use, small size, and fairly high capacity. Their solid state technology means they are much more resistant to a few bumps than other storage media like hard drives.

Despite this, they do often need to take a bit of a pounding, and they are not always designed to be able to handle that. In answer to that A-data designed this drive which is encased in a rubberised exterior.

The design allows it to take those drops on the floor a litle bit better and is also resistant to water for those who insist on using electronics by the pool or who might get caught in the rain.

It comes with many of the standard features of drives today including a USB 2.0 interface, allowing for fast transfer of information. It should require no specail drives in modern operating systems and solution are available too.

Coming in at a reasonable price, this sony vaio computer comes into a range closer to that of what I would like from a home entertainment system PC.

With the usual array of parts, like DVD burner, DVD-ROM, flash card reader, USB, and remote control, what makes sets this model apart from the others in its range?

The Pentium D 820 processor runs a little slower than the 3GHz version of the same cpu, buts allows a much lower price. The premium paid for the fastest is ridiculous at times and I’d rather go for the slowest in the range, than go for an older processor.

The layout of this model is a little more plain. Other models have extra audio/visual ports at the bottom of the front panel, whereas this one does not. There are still the usual ones at the back for the permanent connections you have.

One great thing is that this one comes standard with 2 hard drives in a RAID 0 setup. What this does it set the two drives up together, with the data being split over them and being managed by the onboard controller. The allows much faster speeds as things can be written to either of the drives saving a lot of time. This comes in handy when recording video as it requires a lot of information to be written very quickly to the drives.

The 1GB of DDR2 memory will do the trick and the 128MB ATI graphics card will give you all you need to connect it up to your television and get things running smoothly together.

The A-data flash drive has a small compact size and has a large capacity. It is well priced for drive of 2GB which provides just over 3 CDs worth or space for your data.

It is a standard flash drive with no special software required apart from the usual USB2.0 drivers that come with pretty much all operating systems these days.

Besides its small size making it less bulky to carry, the low profile design will ensure that it will fit in any available USB port. The small height of the USB plug compared to the relatively large height of the flash drives in the past has often meant that they needed and extension cable or a spot with an open adjacent USB port.

USB 2.0 ensures that it will have the highest possible transfer rates for a drive of this kind which should make a big difference for moving large files to and from the flash disk itself.

Other features include:

• 2GB capacity
• USB 2.0 interface
• Drivers for Windows 98 included
• LED indicator when its in use
• Security and Partitioning software are supported