Product Reviews

USB flash drives tend to be much slower than hard disks, but Crucial claims that its 1GB Gizmo! Overdrive can write files at 13MB/s and read them at 25MB/s. We were pleasantly surprised that the Overdrive achieved these speeds when writing and reading large files in our speed tests. It wasn't as quick at reading small files, but at 10.65MB/s it is still faster than most. It seemed particularly slow only when writing small files, where it managed a speed of 0.37MB/s.

The Overdrive is faster than most other flash drives, but it doesn't cost much more than other 1GB disks. We reviewed the standard white model, but you can get a black version with encryption software for ̀25. Both are great value.