Tweakmonster USB Drive

Date Reviewed: August 09, 2002
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel
Companies: Tweakmonster.com

Functionality (Cont):

Using the drive with Linux is a little different, but not difficult. It should supported under any 2.4.x kernel (as long as you have the proper modules compiled in). I tested the drive with the latest Red Hat RPM kernel 2.4.18-5 (using up2date to install it), as well as the 2.4.19 kernel (manually configured & compiled). Using the Red Hat RPM required no extra modifications or changes, it was simple plug and go, but creating your own kernel will require that you have a few options selected. The drive apparently is recognized as a psudo-SCSI device as far as I can tell. If you build your own kernels you will need to have the basic USB functionality & USB storage selected, as well as the generic SCSI choices. If you would like to know exactly what options are needed, feel free to send me an email. Once you plug the drive in, you will have to mount it (like you do a CD-ROM or floppy), which requires you being the root user. The process is very simple:

1. Insert USB Drive

2. Make sure you are the root user

3. Create your mount point if you don't have one already - ]# mkdir /mnt/usbkey

4. Mount the USB Drive - ]# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbkey -t vfat

You only need to create the directory to mount to the first time, then you can use the same directory every time you mount it. Once it is mounted, you can can copy data to and from the /mnt/usbkey directory, similar to reading a CD-ROM or floppy. If you notice when I mounted the drive I specified the type vfat, which is really optional, but I included it so you could see that it reads the drive as a virtual fat file system, which is compatible with Windows (and probably a Mac too). When you want to unplug it, you simply have to un-mount it.

1. ]# umount /mnt/usbkey

2. Remove USB Drive from PC

So it's a little more effort than a couple clicks like Windows, but very simple nonetheless, and most Linux users should know these commands anyhow.

Benchmarks:

For benchmarks I was planning on running Sisoft Sandra & HDTach. However HDTach would not display the USB Drive as an available drive to test. According to the specifications the peak performance was 1000KB/sec.

Sandra reported 984KB/sec which is pretty darn close to the rated speed. If you look near the bottom of the image, you can get the full benchmark breakdown. This is faster than the rated speed that I have seen other drives at, which usually range from 700-800KB/s.

Linux was a little bit trickier, I was hoping it would run hdparm but it would not complete the test. Not having a wide variety of benchmarks that would run with such little space, I had to rely of good old Bonnie. Bonnie++ incidentally was one of the programs that wouldn't run. Anyhow, here's the results from that test:

Conclusion:

Being my first experience with a solid state USB Drive, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The plug-and-play functionality was pretty similar to an external USB enclosure with a hard drive, just on a smaller scale. The best features I think are the cross-OS functionality, the activity LED, and the no-hassle driver-less plug-and-play ability.

At work I have two machines, a NT box and a Linux box. Obviously NT doesn't support USB, but Linux does, and now I can transfer my files onto the USB Drive so I can do work at home and not have to worry about my floppy disks not copying data correctly.

Another great feature of this drive is the transfer speed, while only USB 1.1 (I haven't seen any solid state USB 2.0 drives), it does beat the competition from the specifications I have found on their web sites.

You can buy the Tweakmonster USB Drives at HighSpeed PC (along with lots of other cooling & modding items).

Resellers who are interested in learning more about this product can email the Tweakmonster directly.

Also be sure to check out the Overclockers Forum for more Q&A about this USB drive (as well as talk about everything PC related).

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