I bought one of these from play.com last week and have the following observations:

Good points:

1. It is very fast at reading and writing large to medium sized files. It copied a folder containing eight 2Mb photos (16Mb all together) in about 1/2 a second - so quickly that the dialog box didn't have time to come up before the files were copied - I checked that the photos had copied across three times, 'cos I couldn't believe it was quite so fast! I bought it to replace a 256Mb USB2 drive that I have been using for the past couple of years, which I used to think was quite quick - the Optima knocks spots off it.

2. The swivel design means no detachable cap to lose.

3. The bundled 'carry-it-easy' program looks like it might actually be worth a try, rather than complete throw-away rubbish.

4. At around £13.00, it is really not much more expensive than a bog-standard flash drive, which would be a lot slower and probably a lot less sturdy as well.

Bad… more »

I bought one of these from play.com last week and have the following observations:

Good points:

1. It is very fast at reading and writing large to medium sized files. It copied a folder containing eight 2Mb photos (16Mb all together) in about 1/2 a second - so quickly that the dialog box didn't have time to come up before the files were copied - I checked that the photos had copied across three times, 'cos I couldn't believe it was quite so fast! I bought it to replace a 256Mb USB2 drive that I have been using for the past couple of years, which I used to think was quite quick - the Optima knocks spots off it.

2. The swivel design means no detachable cap to lose.

3. The bundled 'carry-it-easy' program looks like it might actually be worth a try, rather than complete throw-away rubbish.

4. At around £13.00, it is really not much more expensive than a bog-standard flash drive, which would be a lot slower and probably a lot less sturdy as well.

Bad points:

1. It's bulkier than I expected. The swivel design has advantages, but means that it as 'fatter' than most flash drives and when it is open for use, it is actually longer than average as well - it sticks out of the front USB port by over three inches and I have to be careful not to knock (and damage) it if I go near it - this was not a problem with my older, but much more compact flash drive. I know other reviewers have said they think it looks smart, I actually think that the large size makes it look rather old fashioned and dated.

2. While the read and write speeds for larger files is good (I measured around 25Mb/s read speed and around 14Mb/s write speed) for files over about 50Kb, the write speeds in particular for smaller files deteriorates very markedly. I know this is common to all flash drives, but the Optima is known to be particularly bad in this respect, especially considering how fast it is for larger files. I tried copying a bunch of saved web pages, which have lots and lots of very small files in them and while not agonizingly slow, it still took several minutes to copy just a few Mb of data. This is really not a problem if you are going to be using it for things like photos or mp3 files, which are all bigger and will be transferred very quickly.

All in all though I am very pleased with it and I thoroughly recommend it if you are looking for a faster than average drive for a relatively inexpensive price, if you don't mind it being a bit big and dated-looking, in my opinion. I would have given it 5 stars if it were a bit smaller and better looking. To be fair, it probably deserves 4.5, but there is no means to give it 1/2 star ratings, so it just gets a 4.