MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Review: EMTEC 8GB Flash Drives from Big Lots

Pros: It's 8GB of storage for $10USD and makes for my current price point when purchasing flash memory. No frills. No special software/formatting on the flash drive. USB 2.0 interface.

Cons: Slowest flash drives that I have ever used. Separate cap design. See-through smoked plastic reveals the board and electronics within and it can easily be pried open.

Testing: I encrypted the complete drive using TrueCrypt and its Serpent-Twofish-AES chained cipher algorithms. I then proceeded to use the flash drive as my target audio ripping drive.

Most flash drives I have used with similar crypto config usually get Nero to bog down to around 1MB/sec. I think that's okay since I push for a slow rip with jitter correction and Nero is very accurate for the first phase in archival audio capture for further restoration.

In the case of this fully-enciphered flash drive the EMTEC bogs down to around 200-300KB/sec when pushed with the incoming audio rip data and the move of a previous rip to another hard drive drive. For those who like slow rips that may be overkill. I get awesome results at the higher 1MB/sec speed even with the overhead. But this drive will really keep you waiting.

It's cheap yet slow storage. The memory is reliable but I'll have to perform some extended stress testing to see how long it can last with each rewrite.

It's good for the occasional document. But for high data throughput it's the slowest thing in regards to flash memory that I've tested out there.

Manufacturer's Website: http://www.emtec-international.com

--Bekki (© 2012)

Combating functional illiteracy with latex-clad drama since the '80s, because old video games rule!