Play.com / 16GB / USB Flash Drive

So good, I bought another. I've had the 1st one nearly 2 years now and despite a hard life it's still working perfectly, with barely a mark on it.

The case is tough and attractive with a rounded shape that is comfortable in hand or pocket. The cap also stays on securely. Can't fault it. Why pay more?

I bought one of these as a backup for my laptop recovery files and also for data storage.
All loaded up perfectly.
But when I tried to access the data at a later date the unit was totally dead. It failed on 3 seperate machines.
Never again!!
I'll stick to a brand name from now on!

I am always suspicious of cheap flash drives, having once bought a very cheap one that didn't work properly. As soon as I got this one, I tested it and it stored and successfully read back all 16 GB of its capacity. Its average writing speed was 6.5 MB/s and its average reading speed was 15 MB/s, which is by no means top speed, but still a reasonable speed for the price. It is compatible with Windows 7 ReadyBoost.

I was a little dubious about this product, however my experience of using it has been excellent so far. The jury is out on long term storage, however this is an aspect of any non-volatile memory that must be taken on trust.

Many people have complained about the lack of a 'light' to indicate the stick is in use, on mine this is a faint red LED which can just be seen through the dark blue case if you shield it from room lighting.

Speed of writing: not remarkable, Case: cheap but adequate, however could do with a 'lanyard' hole.

Overall, you get what you pay for and this represents good value for money.

can i use this with an xbox 360 as a hard dsik ta save on it because i have a 4 gb memory and isnt enough will this be good because it has to be a 16 gb memory but i dont think this has a full 16 gb pls help

Works like any USB stick would, very handy to have for music and documents!

Nicely made flash drive, great value for the price. I'm using it in the wii console - formatted as wbfs and backed up the kids discs to boot from usb, works flawlessly!

Delivered quickly, well packed; But found this drive to be slow transferring files.

great for a tenner, 16gb USB 2.0 and its pretty sturdy unlike the sandisk flas drives what more can you want .

I bought some of these for myself and a friend a few months ago (Aug 2011, GBP 10.49 each) and despite them having come down in price nearly 25% since then (Currently GBP 8.99 at time of writing, which is a surprise in itself) I still feel as if I've gotten excellent value for money. After all, I'd still rather pay just over a tenner for one of these here than the GBP 19,- "cheapest" price currently showing on a UK high-street retailers site as I write this review!

Onto the product itself: It's exactly what it says on the tin, a standard USB mass storage device (A re-branded Integral, I'm led to believe) without any unnecessary bells and whistles. As usual, drive capacity is slightly less than stated due to formatting (15.3GB on the 16GB and 30.9GB on the 32GB model, which I also bought) and the drive may feel slightly slower than other models, but it still has more than acceptable read/write rates for its size and price.
As an XP and Linux user I havn't been able to try this out with ReadyBoost myself, but it feels like it *might* just be able to manage it, depending on how crowded your USB bus is. (Supposition not guaranteed - Your mileage may vary)

The only real negatives to this product - If any *have* to be mentioned - Is the absence of a drive access light (Very useful for those of us paranoid about safe removal), and maybe the casing itself, which does feel a little thin at first. However, my heavy hands havn't managed to break the shells on any of mine just yet! :-)

Although this product is really designed to be an affordable data storage device, it also serves certain advanced features quite well - It can be partitioned, seems to perform well under TrueCrypt 7.0* and (Although I havn't tried this myself) a number of them chained together as a RAID device under Linux could create a versatile alternative to an SSD for slow-mid speed data storage applications...Although it should be mentioned that the device performs much better when data is written continuously as opposed to a series of small (Appending) writes.
(* - At time of writing, TrueCrypt 7.1 has been released and I havn't tested the drive under that yet. However - Based on performance under 7.0 - I would advise creating your secure partition on the local HDD first and then move/copy it to the flash drive as creating a 1GB partition on the drive directly took me ages when I tried it.)

The bottom line: All in all, this is an excellent product from a great OEM that should provide dependable, reliable and extremely useful data storage for all regular applications, and is definitely a 5-star winner in my book! :-)
+++ DieselDragon +++