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USBKeyDrive Firefly USBee 32MB
Review Date: February 1, 2003
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: USBKeyDrive.com
Initially, I thought that a USB solid state drive would be pretty useless. Another cool tech toy maybe to impress geeks with at the next LAN party. Boy was I wrong. WAY wrong...
The Firefly USBee now goes everywhere with me, and has become one of the MOST useful tools in my everyday job as a PC/LAN Technician. It is smaller, faster and cheaper than any ZIP drive or CD burner, and can be used over and over literally for years. I constantly find myself using it to transfer files from PC to PC at work, and to store files that I need to take home with me, where I used to email them back and forth.
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Retail Package front. Click for larger view.
Features:
- Interface: USB Specification 1.1 (USB 2.0 compatible).
- Capacity: 16 MB/ 32MB/ 64MB/ 128MB/ 256MB 512MB and 1GB coming soon.
- Reading Speed: Up to 1000kb/ sec.
- Writing Speed: 900kb/ sec.
- Read/Write protect: Hardware write protect switch.
- Lifetime: Up to 1million re-writes.
- Data Retention: Up to 10 years!
- OS Support: Windows ME, 2000, XP (Windows 98SE need driver) Mac OS 9.2+ , OS X, Linux 2.4+.
- LED indication: LED on, USB drive connected and inactive LED flashing, Transmitting /receiving data.
- Power: Power supply USB bus-powered (2.7V - 3.3V) Suspend Current < 300uA Operating Current 40mA.
- Operating temperature: -40 to + 70 Celsius.
- Storage temperature: -70 to + 85 Celsius.
- Dimensions: 73mmX23mmX9.5mm.
- Weight: 15 g.
Animation of LED indicator when in use.
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Installation:
Installation on my Windows XP Professional test rig was a breeze. Pretty much anything that uses a USB interface will not require manual driver loading under Windows XP Pro, and the Firefly USBee is no exception.
When you insert the drive for the first time, Windows XP Pro immediately sees that it has a new drive and installs drivers for it. Within 20 seconds on my test rig, the drivers were loaded and the new hard drive was available for use. It just doesn't get much easier than that!
Installation - Click for larger view.
I quickly found out that you cannot simply unplug the drive after you are finished saving files on it. If you do this, you will loose the files that you just saved. In other words, they will not be written to the flash memory in the drive.
In order to properly remove the drive and retain any recently saved files, you must tell Windows to stop the device. To do this, you have to right click on the "Remove USB Device" icon in the system tray beside the clock. You then get a window that lista all USB devices that are running. Select FM2010 Flash Disk USB Device, and click the "Stop" button. You can then safely remove the Firefly USBee and retain any recently saved files.
Properly stopping the USB drive - Click for larger view.
Performance:
To check the transfer rate of the Firefly USBee, I did a simple copy from my Western Digital 120GB SE Caviar drive to the USB drive. To copy the 40.72 nVidia Detonator drivers (12.3MB) to the USB drive took approximately 12 seconds. To copy them back to the WD Caviar drive took approximately 15 seconds. This is right on spec. with what is advertised.
File transfer - Click for larger view.
Being the benchmarking fool I am, I decided that I wanted to see some real numbers. So, I ran Sisoft Sandra File System benchmark to see what the actual throughput would be like, and here are the results:
Conclusion:
As I said in the beginning of this review - I am literally amazed at how much I actually use this thing. I have been so impressed with it, that I showed it to my boss at work and she ordered several of them for herself and the department! The Firefly USBee is small, light, fast, and requires no drivers on most modern PCs. The only problem that I have run in to, is that on some PCs that are equipped with front USB ports (like the new Dell's), the Firefly USBee will not fully insert into the front USB port, and will not work. This problem could be fixed by extending the male USB plug on the device by 1/4 inch or so.
Overall, the Firefly USBee is an outstanding product but because of the problem with front USB ports, we give it a 4X rating.
For more info, see USBKeyDrive's website.
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