USB Drives are great little gadgets that make life so much easier for transporting our data around with us. They’ve gotten miniscule in size so that they are very portable, and even come in different shapes, themes, sizes and colors. As they are they’re pretty much the perfect product, is there anyway to improve them?

Ridata has come up with am improvement over the standard USB drive, they’re already useful products, but using them of course takes up a USB port. Ridata has come out with sort of a solution to that problem, they’ve incorporated a USB hub into a USB drive, so not only can you carry your data, you won’t lose a USB port and you’ll actually gain one in the process. I would say that the Yego is an oddly shaped USB drive, but that’s not true, especially after seeing things like Sushi shaped USB drives, the Yego is actually rather bland when compared to some of the themed drives out there today.

Looks aren’t everything though are they, sure it looks good and even adds USB ports, but how does it perform against other USB drives? read on to find out..

The Ridata Yego comes in a plastic clamshell style package, you can plainly see the product through it, and you’ll find specs and features listed as well.

The Yego I received is blue, there are other colors available as well. There is an LED inside the blue ‘Y’ shaped part that indicates power and blinks for activity. It’s ‘Y’ shaped obviously, with a cap on one end that comes off to reveal the USB connection, the top of the Y is where you’ll find the two additional USB ports or the hub part of it. Overall it seems solidly made, there’s also a small loop on the top for a keychain or lanyard to be attached if one wishes to.

 

Specifications:
RiDATA EZ Yego USB 1gb Flash Drive / USB Hub

RIDATA’s award-winning fun, new YEGO USB Drive is a unique, multi-function USB flash drive featuring two additional USB ports. This allows the user to connect more USB devices and expand their computer’s capabilities. The YEGO features true Plug & Play technology, is USB 2.0 compliant, transfers data up to 480Mbps and is powered via USB port. Bright, tie-style LED lights indicate usage status. The YEGO USB Drive is available in six bright colors and capacities ranging from 1GB to 8GB.

Features:
• Novel Design with two additional ports
• Tie-style LEDs light independently to indicate usage status
• USB drive plus two extra USB ports
• Capacities: 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB
• Compliant to USB 2.0 specification with full-speed transfer up to 480Mbps
• True Plug & Play USB connectivity
• Powered via USB port so no external power or battery is needed
• Power saving mode reduces power consumption
• Two Year Warranty
Hardware Requirements:
• Desktop or notebook computer with USB port

Operating System Requirements:
• Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP
• Support Driver for Windows 98SE
• Supports Mac OS 9.x or later version
• Supports Linux Kernel version 2.4 or later version
Dual-use device combines a high capacity flash drive with two additional USB ports. Users can keep USB devices connected while having the storage use of a flash drive.

Here’s the Yego compared to a couple other drives:

 

and here it is plugged in and being used as a hub as well, you can see the LED light, it’s fairly bright.

Included on the Yego is a couple pieces of software, the first is Webaroo which try as I might I could not get to work at all.

 

It sounds like an interesting program, and might be actually useful, but I tried everything and it wouldn’t work. The program would run and then just shut off.

 

Here’s an excerpt describing it:

"Webaroo is a free software service that helps you to search and browse the web on the go. Install Webaroo, download web packs and web sites on your portable storage device and access your web, anytime and anywhere."

The second program is called iStar and it’s a program that you can use to lock your PC with if you wish, handy I guess. It can also be used to format the Yego in a variety of ways like creating a bootable disk with it.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s see how it performs, just so you know, during all testing I only run the tests, nothing else in the background etc, nothing else running, and I run the command for Process Idle Tasks as well to make sure nothing interferes with testing. All tests are run three times as well and then averaged out.

First up of course we’ve got SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage benchmark:

The Yego is pretty bad when compared to the others…

Here’s the 256mb Files Test:

yes there’s nothing for the write performance, it recorded a 0, so it did less than 0 operations per minute…

next up is DeiskBench, here I’ve got tests with a 350Mb .AVI video file, first up is the time to Copy From, Copy To ans Read from the drives, time is in seconds so less it better.

So it took 179 seconds to write the 350mb file to the Yego, that’s almost three minutes… goofy slow speed… that’s just unbearable really.

Here’s the transfer rates in MB/s for those times:

As you can see DiskBench recorded 1.95 MB/s for the transfer speed while copying to the Yego, that’s why it’s so slow so write…

The Write speed is just ridiculously slow for this drive, it’s amazing really that it could be that slow. I even re-ran the tests again another day just to be sure, and they came out the same. WOW!

So it looks good and is rather useful, but it’s performance is very poor… still though it’s not the slowest I’ve seen.

 

Conclusion:

The Ridata EZ Yego is a great idea that falls flat on it’s face really, the USB hub is great, it’s useful and it’s an excellent addition to an already very useful product, but the transfer speeds are just so slow that it’s utterly useless really as a USB drive.

Sure slow there are slow USB drives out there, but three minutes to write a file that takes every other drives tens of seconds is ridiculously slow and not even worth the wait really, and try as I might I could not get the included Webaroo program to work at all either.

Pros:
USB hub built in
Well made

Cons:
Too slow to be useful for storage

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance