Yesterday I looked at the PNY 16GB Attaché USB 2.0 Flash Drive, so today I figured I would check out the 32gb version. Not much of an introduction is needed here as it’s basically the same drive, but I’ve run it though my tests and compared it to the 16gb Attaché and some other drives, so read on to learn how it did.

 

The packaging for the PNY 32gb Attaché is the same as the 16gb version with just a few minor differences, like the capacity. It is the plastic clamshell style package, and we can see the drive through the front, and of course there are specs and features listed as well.

The 32gb Attaché is made of plastic with green accents on it, the cap is removable of course. I didn’t mention it in the 16gb review, but the cap is fairly hard to get off, but this is a good thing so you are less likely to lose it.

Specifications:

PNY 32GB New Attaché USB 2.0 Flash Drive
Part No. P-FD32GATT2-FS
MSRP: $149.99

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 – works with 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

The 32gb PNY Attaché does feature an activity LED in it, it’s blue in color, the 16gb did not have an LED in it.

The same drives were used for the comparison, and the same tests were run. The drives are the OCZ Rally2 4gb, Corsair Flash Voyager mini 4gb, Sandisk Cruzer Enterprise 2gb and a Super Talent drive, as well as the PNY 16gb Attaché.

First up is SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP2 Removable Storage Benchmark, higher scores are better.

It looks as though overall the 32gb version of the Attaché scores a bit lower than the 16gb version.

Here’s a look at the 256MB Files Test:

As we can see the 32gb Attaché Read Performance is a bit slower than the 16gb, making this one of the slowest drives in the comparison.

Next up is DiskBench and the times it takes to Copy To, Copy From and Read From the USB drives, I used a 350MB .AVI video file for all tests.

The first graph is the times in seconds so lower is better, meaning a shorter time to do the task. I used the Write Performance or Copy To as the reference point of the graph.

As you can see the 32gb Attaché  is about 1 second slower at writing the file, but quite a bit slower for the other tests, than the 16gb Attaché.

Here’s the transfer rates for the test:

Here we can really see why things were slower all around, it’s the actual transfer rates that we got while doing the tests, a bit slow.

Here a again though the other drives in this test are some of the fastest out there today, and they’re hard to beat.

The average price of the 32gb Attaché is about $62, while the 32gb version runs about $40, so for the price really it’s only about $20 more to double the storage capacity, and the cost per gigabyte is lower as well, making the 32gb version the better choice overall really, at least in the cost to gigabyte ratio.

Conclusion:
When compared to other drives it seems the PNY 32GB Attaché USB 2.0 Flash Drive is a bit slow, but the drives I’ve compared it to are some of the fastest out there today so it’s fairly hard to beat them.

All in all though the cost per gigabyte is fairly cheap, and if you’re looking for a large capacity USB drive then this just might fit your needs.
Over the next few days I’ll be adding more and more USB large capacity USB drives to the charts so we’ll see where theses drives really stand when more of the same capacities are tested against them.

 

Pros:
Well made drive
Decent speeds overall

Cons:
A bit slow all around

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance