USB drives are and have always been one of my favorite tech gadgets, they’re just extremely useful. It seems they are advancing at an exponential rate, only a couple years ago we were excited about 64MB USB drives, now we can 64gb USB drives, the sizes now could make other storage media obsolete in a short period of time.

Today I’ve got a 16gb USB drive from PNY for review, it’s called the Attaché. It’s a very small  drive especially considering it’s size, it seems well made as well, but quality and size aren’t much without performance to back it up. So read on to learn how the PNY Attaché fairs against some others I’ve got on hand.

No video today, it’s just a USB drive after all, not much special or entertaining about it, but it’s still a good, handy little product.

The PNY Attache comes in the familiar plastic clamshell style package, you can see the drive through the front, and there’s specs and features listed on the back of the package.

The Attache is primarily black plastic with a red transparent or translucent accent on it.

The cap comes off as with most any other USB drive out there, there’s nothing else included in the package with the Attache either.

Specifications:

PNY 16GB Attaché USB 2.0 Flash Drive

16GB New Attaché USB 2.0 Flash Drive
Part No. P-FD16GATT2-FS
MSRP: $79.99

"Attaché provides the ultimate mobile storage solution for people on the go. Working on a presentation and need to take it with you? Want to share a new song, pictures, or video with your friends? Simply copy the file onto Attaché and take it with you — put it in your pocket, wear it, put it in your backpack or briefcase and you’re good to go. To access your data, simply plug Attaché into virtually any PC or MAC — without the need for bulky cables or adapters. Access your files. Anytime. Anywhere. "

Store, transport and share photos, video, music, documents and more from PC to PC, or connect to your digital picture or printer to view and share your photos.

FEATURES:
* High Performance USB 2.0 Flash Drive – work with Windows ReadyBoost to boost performance and system responsiveness in Windows Vista
* Compatible with most PC/MAC laptop and desktop computers with available USB 2.0 port (Backwards compatible to USB 1.0)
* Store, transport and share you favorite documents, photos, music, videos and more.
* High performance, low power consumption, non-volatile flash memory makes Attache drives more durable than other storage devices
* Also makes a great back-up device thanks to it’s large capacity
* Free technical support and 1-year warranty

So it’s a rather high capacity USB drive that we know, but what we want to know is how it performs and that’s what I aim to find out. I’ve put the PNY Attache up against a few others I’ve got on hand, the OCZ Rally2 4gb, Corsair Flash Voyager mini 4gb, Sandisk Cruzer Enterprise 2gb and a Super Talent drive as well.

For testing of course I use my two favorite programs for this type of product, SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP2 and DiskBench.

First up we’ve got SiSoft Sandra Removable Storage Benchmark, I’ve ranked them from lowest to highest.

Well we see the PNY Attache doesn’t perform very well, or at least it looks that way with this test.

Here’s a closer look at a part of the Removable Storage Test, the 256MB Files test:

as we can see it’s the write speed that is slowing down the Attache.

Let’s look at DiskBench, this test records the time and speed it takes to do something. What I look at is Copy From, Read From and Copy To speeds and times. Copy To is the write speed and time, the other two are obvious, but I include them because these are the common things people will do with a USB drive.

Here’s the first part of the test, this shows the actual time in seconds to do the task, I used the same 350mb .AVI video file for all tests. I’ve arranged the chart from fastest to slowest times, with of course lower time meaning a faster transfer, I used the Write Speed or Copy To as the reference for the ordering of the chart.

As you can see the Attache is rather slow when it comes to write times, doubling and almost tripling the times of the other drives.

Now here’s the second part of the test, this is the transfer speed in MB/s, ordering is fastest to slowest with the write or Copy To speed being the reference for the chart ordering.

Here we really see why the PNY Attache is slow, it’s the write speed of only 9.9MB/s

Honestly 35 seconds to transfer the file isn’t too bad really, the OCZ, Super Talent and Sandisk drives are some of the fastest on the market today, and they’re hard to beat in terms of performance. I can deal with the 35 seconds transfer time honestly, now if we look at the Corsair drive, it’s really slow coming in at just under a minute to transfer the same file, and that I wouldn’t want to deal with, that’s pretty slow really. 20 – 40 seconds write time for a file of this size is about average from my experience, so the PNY Attache drive is on par with most other drives out there in terms of performance and speed.

In terms of quality, it is plastic but the majority of USB drives out there are so that’s no surprise at all. It is small making it very portable, and it feels solidly made

Conclusion:
The PNY Attaché 16GB USB Drive is a nice little option for your portable storage needs. It’s smaller than many others out there making it nice and portable, and it seems well made to survive most of what our daily lives can throw at it.

While it might not be the fastest out there, coming in at around $40 at most stores online it’s relatively inexpensive, sure there are 16gb drives that are priced less, and many more that are priced higher though, with those other drives though we don’t know how they compare just yet.

Pros:
Fast read and transfer from speeds
Well made drive

Cons:
Slow write speeds

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance