2.0 Visual Inspection

The pen drive package is a classical expositor package made of transparent plastic. The content is limited to few components: the Gizmo 1 GB Pen Drive with the USB connector cap, a lanyard for the transport (figure 1) and a multilingual manual for the user with warranty conditions, that, for this product Crucial extends for lifetime.

The Crucial Gizmo! drive enclosure is made entirely of gray-silver plastic, yet feels solid in the hand. It measures 20 x 68 x 8mm, small enough (figure 2) that two can be installed into adjacent USB ports without encountering any space issues. The cap attaches firmly to the drive and on the end of the drive is a small loop just large enough for the neck strap thread to pass through.

The Gizmo! features a red LED on one side of the drive to indicate that the unit is plugged in and operational. The LED flashes when data is being transferred. The Gizmo! has NO write-protect switch (for some people, this is a useful feature to have).

There is no software to install; in particular there are no Drivers for Windows 98. With the proliferation of WindowsXP, plugging a device like the Crucial Gizmo into a system doesn't even require drivers - everything is automatic, and after a few seconds up pops a new hard drive. So long as your PC is running Windows2000 or higher, drivers aren't required to configure USB devices. And you don’t require drivers also if you use this device with other OS like Mac OSX or Linux (kernel 2.4 or above).

The Crucial Gizmo 2.0 flash disk we will be looking at in this review is 1GB in size, and communicates at USB2.0 speeds. There are also 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512Mb and 2Gb versions available, but at $75USD the 1GB version (equivalent to 750 floppy disks) is a pretty good deal.

USB 2.0 is the most recent revision of USB specifications. It represents the evolution of USB from its introduction years ago from USB 1.0 (1.5Mbps, now often referred to as low-speed USB) to USB 1.1 (12Mbps, often referred to as full-speed USB) to the Hi-Speed USB of today, which is the most advanced evolution, with a data transfer rate of 480Mbps. What this boils down to is that USB 2.0 is backward compatible with previous revisions of USB. You can use a USB device or peripheral in a USB 2.0 port, but your device will not run any faster than it was designed to.

In the next page we will give a report on the Gizmo! performance testing.

Introduction

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Performance Analysis

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