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PNY Attache USB Thumb Drive
Introduction
Not every flash drive can be fast, or can be pretty, or can be sturdy, big, small, capacious, easy to find, and discreet. No, some are just a little ugly. PNY’s Attache bears little of the elegance its name may be associated with, but it’s safe to say it does have a few things going for it. First of all, it’s cheap. I don’t mean this to say that it’s constructed poorly or anything like that. Compared to the other flash memory in its class, it just doesn’t cost a lot. It’s housed in the same kind of plastic familiar to everyone who had plastic toys--or at least a sturdy variety of it.  PNY offers a one-year warranty on their flash drives, which is a bit short but who RMAs a flash drive when breaking one gives you the opportunity to shop for a new one?  I tested the drive by copying files to and from it, timing things with a stopwatch. I tested the read and write speeds four different ways, first with a CD-sized single file, an ISO, to check large file sizes. For medium file sizes, I transferred a folder full of 10MB raw images, for small files, I used a folder of about 1.5MB .jpg images, and for tiny files, I used a folder full of Windows system files averaging 20K each.
680 MB (680 MB Files)
(Show All Graphs)
27.55
27.2
27.2
20
0
MB/s (higher is better)
31.6825
10.79
10.3
9.06
4.59
0
MB/s (higher is better)
31.6825
500 MB (10 MB Files)
(Show All Graphs)
26.31
26.3
21.73
18.51
0
MB/s (higher is better)
30.2565
7.69
7.24
5.43
4.23
0
MB/s (higher is better)
30.2565
250 MB (1.5 MB Files)
(Show All Graphs)
27.7
19.23
17.85
15.63
0
MB/s (higher is better)
31.855
5
2.97
1.98
1.92
0
MB/s (higher is better)
31.855
250 MB (20 KB Files)
(Show All Graphs)
9.25
8.62
8.33
8.3
0
MB/s (higher is better)
10.6375
2.97
1.85
0.66
0.33
0
MB/s (higher is better)
10.6375
So as far as read speeds go, this plain little drive did very well. Sure, things slowed down with tiny file sizes, hitting 8MB/s, but most of the time reads were closer to 20MB/s. This isn’t shocking, but it is better than average. Writing files things got a little choppier, like they do, with the tiny writes going the slowest, which is to be predicted, but not still a bit faster than similar drives at around 2MB/s. As files increased in size, write speeds almost hit 10MB/s. Conclusion This drive, performance-wise, is either a little above average or a little below average, but in the best possible way; it’s faster where other drives tend to be slow (but a little slow where drives tend to be fast). I would definitely consider PNY’s Attache for general-purpose flash storage, without worrying about it breaking or anyone wanting to steal it. Pros  Cheap Speeds aren't bad, just averageCons  No nifty features No extras
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Add Comment
1 User Comment 1 - Posted by
abelmo33
on January 23, 2010 - 10:50 am I have a 4 GB Attache Flash drive. I cannot add files nor can I use it for the files I have on it. I get the message "error code - 43"
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