We all need a good USB flash drive these days and those of us who invested in a drive several years ago may well now be looking for something newer, fresher, quicker and with a much larger capacity. With the introduction of useful USB focused extras like PortableApps size does matter as you can take almost all of your digital life with you on your stick!

Introduction

In this review I am looking at the Sandisk Cruzer Micro Skin USB Flash Drive in it’s 8gb form. This is the one that you can currently pick up in Tesco and many other retail shops if you don’t want to pay for postage on such a low value item. Of course you will save a bit of money if you opt to buy online but you may find that you end up paying as much once you add postage unless you’re buying more than one item.

The Cruzer Micro Skin is available from Sandisk in three capacities 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. For the purpose of this review I’m going to assume that all the sticks will perform the same, which isn’t probably true but any differences in performance should be minimal. Anyway, when the 8GB version only costs a little over £10 why would you choose to get one of the smaller ones?

Packaging and Contents

Not much to tell, the packaging is nice and makes good use of cardboard where possible rather than the nasty formed plastic that’s so difficult to open. There’s no supporting software as drivers aren’t needed, unless you’re still running Windows 98 and need USB drivers in which case you’ll have to download them from the Sandisk website.

As for contents, the flash drive is all you get. No added extras, no lanyard or key chain etc. Which at the cheap end of the scale is much as you’d expect. No need to pay for things you don’t need and all that.

The Memory Stick

The Sandisk Skin is one of the cheapest in the current Sandisk range but it still has the feel of high quality. The stick is in fact very small and thin but comes with a transparent/translucent colourless rubber coating which does make it a little larger but really adds to the tactile finish of the product. The cap is made from the same material and once you’ve removed the cap, the main cover slides off quite easily. One annoying point to note is that there is no retention mechanism for the cap. You take it off and then it’s up to you not to put it down and loose it.

On the main stick beneath the cover is a label, much like you used to have on a floppy disk but much smaller. So with the main cover removed you can use a suitable pen to write the contents of the stick on the label or to name it. This could be very useful if you regularly forget to remove your stick from the PC and you regularly go to shared PCs such as at university/college etc. If a kind sole comes along after you’ve gone maybe they’ll hand it in either that or they’ll just nab it for their own!

With the cover (Skin – hence the name of the stick) fitted the stick is a bit wider than a standard USB port but shouldn’t provide too much trouble fitting next to other USB devices, it’s not overly oversized. On the other hand, if you remove the skin then it’s even thinner and will provide plenty of space for other neighbouring devices.

Performance

To measure the performance of this Sandisk USB drive, I have used a couple of tests. As always trying to stick to those that can be downloaded for free by any reader, to aid with comparisons. First off I ran the free version of HDTune which provides detailed tests on the read speed of the drive. Then I moved on to an application called ‘DiskBench’ which is new to mods-n-clocks, but is freely downloadable and offers a selection of additional benchmark tests for storage devices.

Not bad at all for a cheap end flash drive. If you check out reviews of other flash drives you’ll find that even the best ones max out at around 30-35 MB/s so ~24MB/s is about where you’d expect such a drive to be. For comparison purposes my 2gb EasyDisk flash drive only manages an average read of 15.5 MB/s and an access time of 0.8 ms. Further down the USB Flash food chain, my 512MB Generic USB 2.0 flash drive that I was given as a promotional gift at a conference only manages a miserly 11.8 MB/s average.

So I think the HDTune read performance conclusion is that the Sandisk is not the fastest flash disk that money can buy but it could certainly be a lot worse. My older but smaller (capacity) OCZ Rally 2 is still faster but only fractionally at ~ 27 MB/s average read.

Note: Please ignore the CPU usage stat on the HDTune screenshot, this is incorrect. On repeat tests the CPU usage comes out repeatably in the high 7% region (e.g. 7.8%).

So moving on to ‘DiskBench’ I used the Copy File test to copy an 894MB mp4 video file from my PC to the Sandisk drive. This video file is in fact a compressed and quality reduced version of ‘Starship Troopers 2′ which I recorded from TV on my HTPC.

Then I read that same file from the Sandisk drive using the Read File test. The copy file is a good indicator of the write speed of the drive, as the read speed from hard drive will be much faster and therefore the rate limiting step is from the flash drive write. And the read test confirms the results from HDTune earlier except this time applied to an actual file rather than synthetically.

As you can see the read speed reported by ‘DiskBench’ is much the same as those reported by HDTune and the copy/write speed is much lower as expected but still a healthy 9.5 MB/s. Remember this is a test of writing to the drive using an actual real life mp4 file, not a synthetic test which might produce higher results.

Other USB Flash Drive Possibilities

If you’ve ever tried partitioning your USB flash drive in windows you may have found it impossible. It is possible but not on all flash drives. By running the Lexar BootIt program which can be downloaded from here – BootIt. It is possible to use the ‘flip removable bit’ setting to convince your USB flash drive that its actually a USB hard drive. Windows will then allow it to be partitioned as if it were a proper hard drive.

Unfortunately this procedure is not possible on all drives and this Sandisk one is one of the drives which it doesn’t work for. My OCZ Rally2 drive is fine with this procedure though so it’s not just for Lexar drives.

Portable programs that run from your USB stick are very useful. You may be familiar with the U3 flash drives and the programs available through U3. A better alternative (better in my opinion) is the offering from portableapps.com which allows you to load your USB flash drive with a load of useful portable applications that will run from the stick, they are all free and you can even add your own apps. I’ve successfully added CPUz, RealTemp, CoreTemp, Prime95 etc. Although don’t run SuperPi from a USB drive as the tests will run much slower.

This Sandisk drive works OK with Portable Apps, but when the program you are running decides to auto save your progress then it can slow right down for a few moments. If you are willing to take the odd hit in performance then it works just fine. In fact I’m writing this now running Portable Firefox and many of the pictures in this review were uploaded using Portable Filezilla

Conclusion

There are so many flash drives available these days that it really comes down to personal choice. The speed differences between them tend to be quite small and usually they are all pretty reliable. It’s at this point where smaller distinguishing points like the label beneath the skin and the tactile finish to the rubber skin cover provide a product with a little advantage.

Performance does make a difference if you plan to use the drive to boot Linux from or for use with PortableApps etc. You’ll also want a quick drive if you plan to transfer very large files on a regular basis too, such as feature length video files etc. If this is the case then this drive provides plenty of space at a cheap price and it’s not horribly slow but even so, you might also want to consider a slightly faster drive instead.

Pros Nice tactile feel Looks great Major Brand Good performance for its price Cons No cap retention mechanism – easier to loose Cannot be partitioned or mounted as a hard drive

Overall Score: 8/10

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