I haven’t done very many product reviews in my life but on occasion I’ll purchase a device that I feel desires a review. I usually find myself doing this when a product hasn’t gained the amount of recognition it deserves. The Pico_C by Super Talent is one of these products.
The Pico_C is one of three in a series of super small USB jump drives. The C design is my favorite of the three one piece with no moving parts. Most jump drives have tops that get in the way or fall off all the time. With the design of the Pico_C a cap is not required. The other designs are one piece, however A and B have moving parts. In my experience, moving parts break.
Did I mention that this drive is REALLY SMALL!
When I first decided to purchase this drive I wanted something small and fast. I was very close to just getting a microSD card and a microSD USB reader. Instead I purchased this wonderful USB drive. The advantage that the microSD cards have is there ability to be interchanged. Today I could have 4 GB, tomorrow I could have 16GB. Plus I could own multiple SD cards and only one reader. The USB drive though is one part. This was the biggest reason for going with the Pico.
Here is the Front on the Drive:
And the Back of the drive:
Now that you have seen the pictures let me explain more about what I have noticed to be good and bad about this piece of hardware. I purchased the 4 GB model for less than $20. I’m sure in 3 months it’ll be half that price (even with inflation).
Speed:
I was not extremely impressed with the speed of the drive. I tested on both Windows XP and Mac OS X. Neither seemed to write or read at speeds that I would desire. I like to use my jump drives with portable applications like FirefoxPortable. This way I get my own settings and bookmarks. However It still takes 10 seconds to launch Firefox on XP.
I was able to transfer 1 file at a time to the drive at 7MB/sec. If I started transferring two or three files, transfer times grew almost exponentially. It ws really bad.
Reading from the drive is much faster. I have noticed this from almost all jump drives. During a test I was able to achieve an average around 12MB/sec. Which still doesn’t meet what I could call fast standards. Even Super Talent specifications state that the drives should be able to reach “Up to 30MB/s (200X) data transfer rate.” This is not true in my experience.
I was disappointed about this.
Durable:
Really quite amazing. It could almost be a piece of solid steel.
Size:
Remarkable!! It’s as small as the length of my finger nail. Thats Crazy Small.
Overall:
I would recommend this jump drive, although if your looking for speed … look else where.