There are numerous ways to store and transport data these days; from the ancient floppy disk, to the CDR/RW, to DVD-R, to memory sticks and flash memory drives. The floppy disk is past the end of it's lifetime and in fact, I have not personally had a floppy drive in my rig for 2 years now. CDR and CDRW's are great because they are cheap, but if you are anything like me, you have literally hundreds of burned CDs lying around and no clue of what's on them, and they eventually get scratched and thrown out. The newer DVD-R or DVD+R is not quite as cheap, but the same story goes for them.

 This is where USB flash drives come in really handy, because they have several distinct advantages over other removable media. First, they do not require the user to install drivers for the most part. The newer versions of Linux and Windows both recognize USB flash drives and automaticly load the required drivers. Secondly, USB flash drives can be read from and written to just like a hard drive, and in fact are mounted by the OS just like an ATA hard drive would be. Thirdly, there is no special software required to store data on them - no burning software, no packet writing software, nada.

 When USB flash drives started hitting the market about a year and a half ago, they were fairly small in storage capacity, from 16MB to 64MB or so, which is nice but just too small to be of any real use with software being such a storage hog these days. But now, we are finally seeing 256MB and 512MB flash drives at affordable prices, making them viable storage options if you need to transport files.

 On top of USB flash drives having nice capacities now, they have another strong selling point - the are tiny. In fact, most of them are about the size of a cigarette lighter or even smaller. The Adata JOGR 512MB USB flash drive that I am reviewing today is slightly smaller than a Bic cigarette lighter, and lighter in weight as well. It is also encased in soft rubber, making it water resistant as well as shock resistant!

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The Adata 512MB USB 2.0 Flash Disk comes nicely packaged in a small yellow paper box with a large clear plastic window in it so you can clearly see the contents. One thing I thought was rather odd is that I could not find the manufacturer's name or logo anywhere on the box. The only way I knew Adata was the manufacturer was information from the product sponsor, Computer Gate.
Other than that, the package was very nice and clearly had the products specs displayed on the back.

Specs:

• Supports USB 2.0 standard.
• Capacity: 512MB.
• Maximum transfer speed up to 480Mb/sec.
• Hot swappable; true Plug and Play.
• LED for data access.
• No external power or battery needed.
• More than 10 years data retention.
• Includes USB extension cable
• Key chain included.
• Driver CD included.

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Testing:

To test the Adata 512MB USB 2.0 Flash Disk, I am using three different PCs:
All three are Pentium4 systems, two are P4 2.4Ghz with 1024MB TwinX Corsair memory running Windows XP Professional, and the third is a slightly older P4 1.6Ghz with 512MB OCZ memory running Windows XP Professional.
All three systems have all current Windows updates installed, and are used on a daily basis.

 Upon plugging the USB drive into each test PC, Windows XP immediately recognized the drive and assigned it a drive letter. On all three PC,s the drive was set up and ready to use within 10-15 seconds. Nothing to complain about there. In fact, it's probably the simplest hardware installation I have ever seen.

Performance:

Next, I wanted to see how the Adata 512MB USB 2.0 Flash Disk compared to other similar devices. To achieve this, I used Sisoft Sandra 2004 SP2 - Extreme Edition. Sandra 2004 includes 2 different benchmarks that can be used to test flash drives; the File System Benchmark, and the Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark.

 Performance was right on par with, and actually higher than most of the competition. Compared to the results in the Sandra2004 database, the Adata is in the 80 percentile as far as throughput performance. Not bad at all! Here are the Sandra results:

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 As you can see, the Adata 512MB USB 2.0 Flash Disk does pretty well, especially for a drive of it's capacity. In real life, all the drives I tested seemed to be about equally fast. But this drive has a very unique quality which none of the other have. The Adata Flash Disk is totally encased in a soft rubber shell which makes it highly water resistant and shockproof. To test these features, I came up with a few unusual torture tests...

Durability:

To test the durability of this drive that is supposedly water resistant and shockproof, I devised a few unusual tests:

• Washing machine and clothes dryer test. This simulates the "Oh crap, I forgot to empty my pockets!" scenerio.
• Drop/Shock tests. Drop the drive from various heights, to see how much of a "shock" it can survive.

 For the washing machine/clothes drier test, I put the drive into a pocket on a pair of denim jeans, threw them into the washer and washed them. After that, the jeans went into the clothes drier for 20 minutes, until the jeans were completely dry.

Results: The Adata 512MB USB Flash Disk survived, and worked flawfessly!

 For the drop/shock test, I dropped the Adata Flash Disk from several different heights, onto different surfaces:

• From 6 feet - onto carpet.
• From 6 feet onto concrete.
• From 12 feet onto a grassy lawn.
• From 12 feet onto concrete.
• From 25 feet onto a grassy lawn.
• From 25 feet onto concrete.

Results: The Adata 512MB USB Flash Disk survived once again, to my surprise and again worked flawfessly, proving that the drive is truly shockproof even under severe conditions. In fact one point that I wanted to mention that was a little funny is that when dropped, the Adata drive bounces like a super ball! Very clever engineering to be sure. I was very impressed since I had never seen a flash drive encased in rubber before.

Conclusion:

When I first received this product, I thought it would be "Just another flash drive", but I have to say that after a few weeks of testing and daily use, it is by far the most impressive USB flash drive I have ever seen. The performance is right on par with other flash drives of it's class, it is practically indestructible and can be bought for less than $90USD at Computer Gate who sponsored this product for review. To top it all off, it is the smallest flash drive I have tested, and has the highest capacity so far. Adata has done a terrific job designing this drive, and the only thing I could find that could be considered a "minus" is that a few drives on the market do perform better as far as raw throughput goes, but they also cost quite a bit more as well.

With that said, I am rating the Adata 512MB USB Flash Disk a 4 out 5 X's. Excellent product, Adata!