Written By:
Date Posted: June 19, 2002

Portable storage is very convenient. Why burn CD's or put your documents or music on a bunch of floppy's when you can carry it all on a key chain? Sounds good, right? Well don't go out and buy a DiskOnKey from just yet, as the device isn't all it is cracked up to be.

Specifications

64 MB storage capacity
USB-interface
USB-powered (no batteries required)
Supports multiple OS's, including Linux and MacOS 9.0
Weighs 20 grams (which according to my street-smarts is about .7 ounces)
Attaches to a keyring

The DiskOnKey was designed with many different user's in mind. It appeals to business users who may need to transport documents and presentations to their home PC to work during the weekend, as well as people who want to take a few tunes from MP3 collection to a friends house without burning a CD. It's small size makes it easy to carry around and smuggle across the border. For those of you who actually use a keychain, the DiskOnKey will attach to it.

The DiskOnKey touts itself as being driverless, but the truth of the matter is, only Windows XP, ME and 2000 have support for it out of the box. This is a real bummer when you consider that the drive was designed to go anywhere. What is so great about loading drivers for the device on every Windows 9x and Linux box you use it with?

Functionality and Performance

So how did the DiskOnKey fare? Quite badly, unfortunately. I had issues with the DiskOnKey being dropped by the system or not being recognized at times. I also had severe issues with data transfer. In the middle of a document transfer the DiskOnKey decided to lose my data. What if it were a very important document that needed to be ready to go, but you couldn't work on it because your DiskOnKey doesn't work right? You would probably get yelled at by your boss and you would be regarded to loser status amongst your friends and family. I was told by DiskOnKey that a new unit would be sent to me since I just was sent a faulty unit, but as of press time I hadn't received anything.

I intended on benchmarking the DiskOnKey with SiSoft Sandra and comparing the scores with a floppy drive, but the test would not complete since the drive would just drop out.

Conclusion

M-System's failure to send me another unit for evaluation really makes it hard to come to a proper conclusion.  I couldn't get the unit they originally sent me to work, and after waiting far too long for another unit I had to go ahead with the review as planned.

Pros

Hmm, uhh, well...

Cons

Our test unit didn't work.

M-Systems failed to send another unit for testing

Bottom line

Unfortunately M-Systems failed to get me a properly working unit, therefore I cannot recommend this product.  Shall M-Systems decide to take care of the situation, I will be happy to review another unit fairly. 

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