Thumbdrive Secure

The Thumbdrive gets its name from the fact that it’s barely the size of a thumb. It’s a USB storage device with storage capacities of 8 MB and above. The Thumbdrive comes in two versions, the plain Thumbdrive and Thumbdrive Secure. The difference between the two is that the Secure one requires a password before you can access it. What we got for review at PCQ Labs were the 8 MB and 32 MB versions of Thumbdrive Secure. The Secure drive is also available in a 64 MB model, while the plain Thumbdrive is available in capacities higher than 64 MB too.

Opening the box gave us the Thumbdrive itself, the manual, a CD-ROM, and a label for fixing on the drive. The drive currently works only on Windows 9x, Me, and 2000. Drivers for the Mac are currently in Beta. Installation is fairly simple. You plug the drive into the USB port and Windows auto-detects it. It then asks for the drivers, which you provide from the accompanying CD-ROM. In fact, all that the CD contains are two sets of drivers, one for Win 9x and the other for Windows 2000, which could have easily fit on a floppy. Once you install the drivers, you have to give the default password (fifteen zeros) to access the drive.

The drive shows up in your machine as a removable disk, and you can give it a suitable name as well as change the password. On the login screen that appears when you plug the disk in, you’ll find a Scan option, whose function is not explained anywhere. If you click on the Scan button, you get a message saying that all information in the drive will be destroyed. Possibly, this is some sort of formatting.

On the other end from the USB connector on the drive is a small lock. It took us quite a bit of hunting to find this one out. It’s actually a small knob, and you need a sharp instrument like a pin to get at it. Moving it over to the locked position locks the disk and prevents you from writing or erasing data. The locked and unlocked positions are clearly marked. There’s also a small LED indicator near the lock that shows when the drive is being written to or read from. The usefulness of this is doubtful, because most computers have their USB ports at the back, out of your sight.

The drives performed quite well in our tests, even playing back large movie files without stopping or frame dropping. The drive is also capable of standing up to
mishandling that would’ve made a floppy disk give up.

The Thumbdrive is a nice piece of engineering, useful, robust, and compact. However, the very compactness that makes it unique could prove to be a deterrent in its wider acceptance, because it can be easily misplaced. It must be to prevent this that a hole is provided in the drive’s cap. Maybe, you can put it in your key chain! 

Another crib is about the manual, which provides screen-by-screen instructions on installing the device on a PC, and little else–for example, when you should use the Scan function. Moreover, all that paper could have been saved by putting the manual as a softcopy on the CD, with starting instructions printed on the CD
surface itself. 

Coming to the pricing, it does appear to be a bit steep at Rs 336 per MB for the 8 MB drive and is only slightly better at Rs 84 per MB for the 32 MB one. Hopefully, by the time they come out with a 1 GB Thumbdrive, the price would be comparable to other removable storage media.

These cribs are more of form rather than function. Otherwise this is a very interesting device that could well be an indicator of things to come–of compact, robust and portable storage media.

Krishna Kumar at PCQ Labs