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Written by Chris Tangora
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Thursday, 07 September 2006 |
A fire fizzle drive
Flash drives have become a standard for techs and users alike. There are countless possibilities with the flash drives, from using them as a scratch disk in Photoshop, backups of vital user files, and quick transfers between workstations, home and the office. With capacities from a few MB to multiple Gigs, these devices are easy to throw in your pocket and bring your data with you.
The downside to most of the Flash drives is that they are USB based, and most of the vintage macs only have USB 1 and Firewire, no USB 2. Doing any kind of backup or copying via USB 1 is slow and painful and the time it takes to do a full backup can run into what should be live time. Along comes Kanguru's Firewire Flash drive, the first and only firewire flash drive on the market (to the best of my knowledge) with a $119.95 pricetag. My initial hope was to make it a scratch disk for Photoshop. I picked up that idea from a PC laptop user who was able to do amazing work on his laptop by devoting his entire USB 2 flash drive to Photoshop as a scratch disk. I plugged in my new firewire flash drive and found no real performance improvement. With the photoshop idea scratched, I moved on to using it transfer data back and forth between offices and to run develop software test against it. For simple read/write jobs it was adequate.
There is a blue/red led light that shows connection and transfer activity. It is an easy carrying size and comes with a Firewire stand so you don't have to reach around each time you want to plug / unplug it. The cover stays snug and the flashing light looks cool when you have heavy activity to it. The device tested was a 1GB drive, but it comes in a 2 and 4 GB. It is powered solely by Firewire and comes with a small clip and cover for the connection end.
While the Firewire option of a flash drive is great, the performance and quality of the product makes this Firewire a fizzle. The biggest failure is the transfer speed. I was shocked to see how slow the actual transfer speed was, it averaged 4 MB/sec read and 3.5MB/sec write. Compared to a LaCie 7200 RPM external Firewire drive that reached 30MB/sec and OWC's Mini Stack II which reached 35 MB/sec in transfer speed. This Kangaroo was not jumping too fast. Kanguru's website says to format for a Mac under Mac Extended for best results, but I tried all varieties of formating and they were right, the Mac OS Extended was the fastest, but not what a Firewire flash drive should be. The speeds could actually be considered, painfully slow.
The second downside the Kanguru Firewire flash drive is the design. While the small size is a requirement for a good flash drive, the casing is fat and had to be forced in against the casing in a Smurf and wasn't able to fit on another older tower. Any Firewire slot that does not have 3/8" clearance on either side will not work with this device. The bulkiness of the device just doesn't fit between the Firewire plug and the case. While the connection device that comes with it overcomes this downside and is nice to have the drive in front of you, it is not practical to carry the holder around with you. Another issue of the design is the plastic clip, I was sticking this in my jean pocket a few times and next thing you know the clip cracked off! It didn't affect the performance, but it made me feel the quality of design and workmanship could be better. Really now, how much more would a metal clip be compared to a plastic clip?
Unfortunately, there are no other true Firewire flash drives on the market right now. This is a good prototype of a Firewire flash drive, but it should have gone through more product testing before being released as a final product. I don't claim to know enough about the differences between firewire and USB to know why they can't make the transfer speeds what they should be, but the end result is that the transfer speeds were poor, the materials were cheap, and the design did not work for me or my Mac.
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The Good: Only firewire flash drive available.
The Bad: Doesn't fit into G Towers, plastic clip breaks easy, horrible transfer speeds.
The Skinny: This is more of a novelty than a working device.
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