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  PQI Portable Storage Drives

  Punit Lodaya, Feb 15, 2007 1537 hrs IST

  Today, we take a look at some of portable storage drives from PQI.

  

Page 1 - PQI U330 1GB Thumbdrive Page 2 - PQI U350 1GB Thumbdrive Page 3 - PQI Pro 220 Thumbdrive Page 4 - PQI U510 Pro 1GB Card Drive

With the recent drop in prices for flash-based storage drives, it has become very tempting to buy one. The average price of 1GB thumb drives is almost around Rs.600.

Today, we take a look at some of portable storage drives from PQI. All of these drives have a storage capacity of 1GB, but they are still different from each other especially in their physical form. Read on to find more.

PQI U330 1GB Thumbdrive

This is one of the most basic and ordinary-looking drive from PQI. However, PQI advertises the U330 to be one of the fastest thumb drives in read/write tests. That we will conclude only after we are done with our benchmarks. The drive is plug-n-play and doesn't require any drivers to be installed when used with any OS after Windows 2000 or Mac OS 10.x.
The bundle didn't have any driver CD bundled along; so it won't be possible to use the drive with Win98/Me/NT. A USB extension cable has been bundled along.

Specifications
Interface: USB 1.1 & 2.0
Capacity: 512MB~4GB
OS Supported: Windows ME, 2000, XP, Mac 10.1 or above
Power Supply: DC 3.3/5V " 10%
Power Consumption: Read <100mA, Write <100mA, Standby <70mA, Unconfiguration <70mA, Suspend <0.5mA
Dimensions: 67 x 17 x 2.5 mm (2.64 x 0.67 x 0.1 in)
Weight: 10 g (0.02 lb)
Benchmark

Performance
We transferred our standard test folder, which contains hundreds of smaller files to and from the drive, after which we transferred a single large file in both directions. Following are the results:

Single File Read (700 MB)
Time Taken: 35 Seconds
Speed: 20 MBps

Single File Write (700 MB)
Time Taken: 50 Seconds
Speed: 14 MBps

Multiple File Read (584 MB/173 Files/8 Folders)
Time Taken: 28 Seconds
Speed: 20.85 MBps

Multiple File Write (584 MB/173 Files/8 Folders)
Time Taken: 58 Seconds
Speed: 10.06 MBps

As you see, this drive has excellent write speeds and read speeds. Let's see if SiSoft Sandra 2007 has anything different to say.
SiSoft Sandra 2007

Conclusion
The PQI U330 1GB sells for Rs. 1175, which make it a pricy option. But if you are looking for a drive with excellent build quality and superb transfer speed, this may be the one. However, there are better options; one of them is here.

Page 1 - PQI U330 1GB Thumbdrive Page 2 - PQI U350 1GB Thumbdrive Page 3 - PQI Pro 220 Thumbdrive Page 4 - PQI U510 Pro 1GB Card Drive

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