By Andrew Liszewski
Sony is known for making some unusual decisions at times, but not when it comes to design in my opinion. Take these relatively new USM-L Micro Vault flash drives. They’re clean, compact and feature a BIC-inspired ‘click to open’ mechanism that hides and protects the USB connector when not in use. The drives are color-coded based on their capacity (they range in size from 1GB up to 32GB) and a “prism” LED flashes and glows to indicate when the drive is in use. The USM-L Micro Vaults also support Windows Readyboost, and include Sony’s Virtual Expander software which will automatically compress or decompress files as they’re copied to or from the drive, roughly tripling their capacity.
[ Sony Micro Vault USM-L ] VIA [ Fareastgizmos ]
My secretary bought me one of these a couple of weeks ago. It was a day that will live in the annals of history. By that I mean that I was unimpressed and threw it in my desk drawer. Now, if it had a pen built in…..I'd probably throw it away because after all, Bic pens typically last about 10 seconds before they don't want to write anymore.
Tripling their capacity? There is no way that rudimentary compression software can triple the capacity of the drives–perhaps some files can be compressed that much, but there is no way that you could take, say a 700MB avi file and get it down to 230MBs….and most files follow a similar suite.
You might be surprized to find that every functional file your system runs is uncompressed to run them faster. Every EXE, COM, DLL, SYS, INF, DRV, and most others. Theres only a handful of files that dont respond to compression like AVI, MP3, ZIP, etc. because they have already been heavily compressed as they are made.
Uncompression is resource intensive as you can tell in task manager when you are running WinRar or MediaPlayer. If most Windows files were compressed it would take the better part of an hour to boot it to the desktop.
My secretary bought me one of these a couple of weeks ago. It was a day that will live in the annals of history. By that I mean that I was unimpressed and threw it in my desk drawer. Now, if it had a pen built in…..I'd probably throw it away because after all, Bic pens typically last about 10 seconds before they don't want to write anymore.
Tripling their capacity? There is no way that rudimentary compression software can triple the capacity of the drives–perhaps some files can be compressed that much, but there is no way that you could take, say a 700MB avi file and get it down to 230MBs….and most files follow a similar suite.
You might be surprized to find that every functional file your system runs is uncompressed to run them faster. Every EXE, COM, DLL, SYS, INF, DRV, and most others. Theres only a handful of files that dont respond to compression like AVI, MP3, ZIP, etc. because they have already been heavily compressed as they are made.
Uncompression is resource intensive as you can tell in task manager when you are running WinRar or MediaPlayer. If most Windows files were compressed it would take the better part of an hour to boot it to the desktop.