Pretec i-Disk Rex 100 32B USB 3.0 Flash Drive Pretec i-Disk Rex 100 32B USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Pros: great product
great price

Cons: never arrived

Other Thoughts: In the ordering process I wasn't allowed to select a PO Box for shipping. As it turns out, Newegg does use USPS when shipping small items, not disclosed on the website. I asked customer service what I could have done differently, and they said "it was obvious" which items are light to ship. In a rush to get the flash drive I was completely derailed and it was sent back to the Newegg. They offered better shipping for free on a new order, since returned items are automatically processed for refund, but they told me there was nothing else they could do. In short, I didn't do anything wrong, according to the website, and they couldn't admit to any wrong doing. My conclusion: unless absolutely necessary, I wont use Newegg again.

Pros: Great physical design.
• The drive is narrow enough to not block adjacent USB ports on computers such as the MacBook Pro.
• The indigo, brushed aluminum finish is beautiful.
• The cap actually stays on.
• The activity LED is not obnoxiously bright.

Actual capacity is 33.19 (33185333248 Bytes) when using base-10 (Mac OS X 10.6 & 10.7 do), so its base-2 capacity should be 30.9 GB.

Cons: Relatively poor performance on USB 2.0.

I purchased this for its supposed flash memory performance. I figured that even though I was using it on USB 2.0 devices, the better flash memory would improve USB 2.0 speeds as well. I was hoping to make a bootable Linux partition. I have a USB 2.0 32 GB Patriot XPORTER that transfers files much more quickly (both large files and groups of small files). I've tried MBR and GPT partition schemes, and I've tried FAT32, ExFAT, and JHFS+ file systems on different computers and OSs to no avail.

USB 2.0 Benchtest with Drive Genius 3 on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3
Sustained and random read: 16 MB/s
Sustained write: 4 MB/s (for any files larger the 64 kB)

Random write: takes so long to even start that I'm not going to wait for it to finish before posting this review.


Disclaimer: I am not familiar with this product's USB 3.0 performance.

Other Thoughts: There is great potential for this product if PRETEC was to use better flash memory or a better controller. Maybe it's some weird issue with how it needs to be formatted or maybe it just performs poorly on USB 2.0, but if that's the case then I don't want this product. My reference flash drive, the Patriot XPORTER, works relatively well in any partition scheme or file system, just not as well as I want.

Pros: Fast and fits next to other usb plugs

Cons: None