I thought this was an excellent piece of kit, very reliable on pc and mac, good design.. Except one thing. It's so easy to loose, would have been perfect if it had a key attatchment

I bought one of these back in May this year for £17.99, and used it primarily to back up data from one PC to another.

What I found impressing was the data transfer rates, read and write times are pretty fast, and also the nice capless, swivel design is quite neat. Theres a red LED to show you when its reading and writing which is visible from either side of the memory stick, but depending on the location of your USB port on your PC et al, you may not even notice it !!! (and not that you would need to either).

Also, contrary to the product description on the PNY website and the packaging, the device does work with Windows 98se, Me, and upwards without any drivers, and as far as I'm aware Windows 98 with a driver. The only thing which may not function is the included 'Carry it easy' encryption software.

I recently tried this device in an in-car stereo system with a usb input and I must say that the file access times are second to none.

A lanyard would not have gone amiss and its a shame one isn't included, but thats the only small gripe I have.

In summary, its a very good device for the quoted high speeds and huge 8GB capacity, all at a resonable price.

The price is good and the size is exceptional and more than enough though i found 2 annoying things.

1. a normal metal ring wont go round the the usb provided so im going to have to find a smaller metal ring to go round the usb and then round my normal key ring.

2. the software is rubbish for protection. Ok if you lost it no one can see your data but they can just delete it and use it for themselves. It only asks for a password when you load the program. I was hoping it would ask a password as soon as you connected it. The software itself is not my kind of thing. I like to transfer, drag and drop, copy and load with little effort. but you have to decrypt the file then open it. you cant drag and drop unless you have decrypted it and when you stop using the usb you have encrypt it again so no one can see your files which would obviously make the program useless if you didnt go through this process. So ive just removed the program and am using it as a normal usb as it should be.

Very fast indeed... If someone can tell me how I can put a password on it before it loads everything that would be great...

Thanks

Nice capless design, seems to perform nice and fast too.

The casing has a slot in it for attaching laynards/keyrings etc but there is no included metal ring or laynard (presumably to keep costs down).

It works fine on my Mac (OSX 10.5.2) despite the packaging only mentioning Windows compatibility.

It comes pre-formatted as FAT32 with a copy of the useful looking 'Carry It Easy' on it already (windows only I'm afraid). Bear in mind that a single file cannot exceed 4Gb in size with FAT32 if you plan on transferring large DVD ISOs around!

Benchmarked this at up to 30mb/s read and 15mb/s write.
That puts the performance of this stick up with the likes of the OCZ rally 2, which sells for twice this price!

8Gb more than enough space for anything you can think of!