In this day and age of increased uptake of cloud storage, one might wonder, where do flash storage devices fit in? While physical external storage in the form of external hard disk drive or NAS device will help you take backups of your data to keep it safe, cloud storage options such as SkyDrive, Dropbox, and so on, help you access your data whenever, wherever. So where do flash storage devices really fit in?
These nifty little devices are essential and still relevant. Why? Because they are easy to carry around, offer encryption features, and will still work if there’s no internet connection around. Also, flash drives are so cheap and ubiquitous that you can probably have them stashed everywhere, even on your keychain. One company that has been persistently churning out one flash drive after the other is SanDisk. Today we have the SanDisk Cruzer Orbit in our hands for review.
The Cruzer Orbit USB Flash Drive has a distinctive 360-degree swiveling design for protecting the drive’s connector when not in use. This is especially useful if you have the Cruzer on your keychain – the design features a protective cover that rotates 360 degrees to shield or expose the drive’s connector. This circular-shaped drive also features a convenient place to attach a binder ring or a lanyard.
The Cruzer Orbit is currently available in storage capacities of up to 32 GB. For this review, we received an 8GB device. In addition, the Cruzer Orbit comes with SanDisk’s SecureAccess software, which offers you encrypted password protection for your data. The Cruzer Orbit’s design is quite practical and the burshed metal finish matches the overall design of the product.
The SanDisk Cruzer Orbit comes with a USB 2.0 interface. It would have been better if it had USB 3.0 interface and a faster data-transfer speed. We tested the data transfer speed by using a 1.5GB test dump that included assorted data such as music, videos, Word files, Excel files, zipped files, text files, images and so on.
Transferring the 1.5GB test dump from our test bed to the SanDisk Cruzer Orbit took about about 2 minutes, which is not bad considering this one is a USB 2.0 device. If you are on the lookout for an affordable and uniquely designed USB flash drive, you might want to consider the SanDisk Cruzer Orbit.
Price: AED 27 (8GB)
