Play.com / 16GB / USB Flash Drive

Hard drives are measured using 1 GB = 1 billion bytes. Memory is measured using 1 GB = 2 to the power 30 bytes = 1073741824 bytes (also called 1 GiB). So 1 GB of RAM is about 7% more than 1 GB of disk.

This USB drive contains 14.9 GB of memory, which is 16 GB of disk. This is the normal way disk drives are specified.

Measuring just less than 7 centimetres in length, this 16GB Flash Memory Stick from Play.com is a great piece of hardware. Transfer of files to and from the stick is rapid, and it is fast enough to be used as a Readyboost application in Windows Vista.

There is no keychain attachment to the stick, so it cannot be fastened to a key ring like similar sticks can, which may be annoying if you wish to carry it about without fear of losing it, but as I use mine as a stationary simple file back-up device, I do not see this as a problem. Likewise, the lack of a flashing light when the stick is in use may also be seen as an irritation, but in my view this makes the stick more attractive when plugged into devices where such flashing lights are a distraction, such as televisions and digital photograph frames.

Build quality is good, and the device feels solid between the fingers, with an attractive dark blue plastic finish. And at this price for 16GB of storage space, this Flash Memory Stick comes highly recommended.

This is the cheapest 16GB flash drive I've seen around. £16.49 delivered - thanks Play. Nearly £1 per GB!
I use my flash drives a lot and this has been great so far. Transferring data's nice and fast too.

I bought one of these last year after my PC crashed to backup all my photo's n music. Works just fine, good price, great product. Would defo buy again...

I do not own this item but I do own a similar one from the same brand and as a reply to AKAHowitzer: My drive is 16 060 051 456 bytes. For some reason the metric system is allowed here and is called 16 GB.
1GB is actually 1024MB. 1MB is 1024 KB and so on. The real calculation would be 16060051456 bytes/ 1024 MB / 1024 KB / 1024 bytes = in my case 14,95 GB.

By the way. My Kingston datatraveler has been working fine the last one and a half year. I recently transferred 5,5 GB. That took 12 minutes. Before I did that I hat to reformat the drive to the NTFS file system. I also have an older 1GB Datatraveler that survived a go in the washer. Still running more than 2 years after that incident.