Transformers USB Flash Memory Drive 32gb review

The team up that no one has demanded, but should have.

As a man who grew up loving the first generation of Transformer cartoons, I have fond memories where I wished for Blaster to have been an actual working radio. How awesome would that have been back in the eighties to have been able to pop Ravage into Soundwave and having the ability to record and play back music?

Imagine my surprise when one day cruising Amazon, I ran into an updated design of "Ravage" as a working USB thumb drive instead of (for obvious reasons) a cassette tape. Not believing my own eyes, I saw that this device has 32gb's of flash storage and actually transforms to a working USB drive and back to panther mode. Without hesitation I placed my order, paid my $19.99, and a few days later my package arrived.

"Ravage" in "Panther" mode.

"Ravage in "Thumb drive" mode

The first thing that I noticed was the cheap overall build of this device. The joints are loose, and the USB tip can be easily be broken by accident if you're not careful with it. The weight comes in at 24g and feels extremely light and hollow. This is obviously a cheap knock off based on a nostalgic design, however the fanboy in me did not care as the novelty was still going strong at the time.

Out of the box, the usable space on this drive is 31.3 GB (formatted as FAT32) and is rated as a USB 2.0 device. Of course being curious about the performance of this device I put the transfer speeds to the test. Connecting the device to a USB 3.0 port on my i7 desktop, I averaged between 7.95 MB/s to 19 MB/s with a total of 14.1 GB's worth of various files copied from the drive to my PC.

Write speeds to the device are a totally different story. Copying less than 2gb's of files the speeds ranged from 2 MB/s to just over 5 MB/s and according to Windows 8 pro was to take 10 minutes.

Overall, this device is more a conversational piece than it is a practical day to day device for hard core use. I suspect that the cheap and slow memory would not have a very long life with constant use and all but the most careful of enthusiasts would be able to keep from breaking this device by accident with repeated transformations.

Source: Amazon.com

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