A Veritable Sea Of USB Flash Drives
There are a whole host of USB flash drive suppliers: Kingston, Sony, Hana Micron, Interactive Media, QDI, Transcend, to name just a few. In a pricing comparison, we would need to put those models with the same capacity from various manufacturers up against each other. This is made more difficult by the plethora of new products featuring USB 2.0. Their prices are in some cases far below those for devices with USB 1.1.
We found it relatively difficult to make out quality differences between the individual products - the only real dissimilarity is in the warranty periods. This means that a purchase decision can be comfortably reduced to criteria such as what you get in the delivery, drive dimensions or transfer performance.
While the three newcomers use similar technology, the Axis Mobile Disk has an intelligent protective mechanism: instead of removing a cap, you just twist the locking clamp 180° and the drive is ready for use.
The biggest by far is the Kanguru Micro Drive from Interactive Media Corporation (IMC). It is the only one with a USB 2.0 interface.
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