Read my 1GB Corsair USB pie

WE CAME across a rather interesting product from memory manufacturer, Corsair. The USB stick was and is the death sentence of the unreliable floppies and I don't know many people who use computers that don't have at least one. It is the safest, easiest and smallest way to transfer date. We use it a lot.

You would think that the companies can not develop much new in the USB league, but they can. The standard USB key has the USB plug, a cap and it works. Those are the key elements. It is all about capacity and some of the devices are even water resistant.

Now, Corsair brought out an interesting USB stick. It calls it Readout USB 2.0 and it is a 1GB very well designed drive, a little too big for our taste. The key point of this stick is the display, which supports 11 Character programmable alphanumeric characters. The display itself is based on bi-stable Cholesteric Display (BCD) marchitecture and it can save the information for up to one year without a battery.

The display consists of a chart pie that graphically shows how much space is occupied on the stick and the second part shows how much MB you have left on your stick. The top part of the display shows the name of the device and the test sample was simply named Fudo RM where RM stands for Removable Media.

The package includes a small setup CD, lanyard and USB cable and Corsair offers a 10 year warranty.

We tested the device under Vista and good old Windows XP. As soon as you delete the big file, the pie and the numerical size on the display updates. Under Windows XP it takes just seventy seconds to copy the 700 MB AVI file. The average writing speed was exactly 10 MB/s. It takes thirty six seconds to copy the file from the stick to your machine and shows a really great 19.4 MB /s reading speed.

It takes 10 seconds to copy nine MP3s, And Justice for All from Metallica from a PC to desktop and you need five seconds to copy the files from USB to a machine. The folder occupies 60MB.

On Vista we tried to copy 700MB large AVI file and it took us two minutes and forty five seconds. The average writing speed was 4.24 MB/s. We think that Vista still needs to polish up the USB and SATA drivers.

In short
With a suggested retail price of $39.99 it is a nice well designed device, maybe little big bigger than we want it to be and it also comes in a 2GB size.

I don't think you really need the display to tell you how much more can you store on the drive but it makes it different from the competition and it is something that you can amaze your friends with. Corsair Readout looks indeed cool. ?