Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight

Portable storage can take many forms, but here's a flash drive that's a dead ringer for something you might already carry?the Swiss Army knife on your key ring. The Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight (4GB) ($40 street) is a small, lightweight USB flash drive with an attractive design and a potent software package.?Although it may not be the cheapest drive you'll find, it's easily one of the finest looking.

Design
The Slim Flight (4GB) lives up to its Swiss Army name, with a handsome pocket knife?style swiveling cover, complete with an integrated clip to secure and easily open the drive. No larger than a traditional Swiss Army keychain pocket knife, the cover of the slim USB drive is metal, with a textured surface and the Swiss Army logo. Our review unit came in silver, but other colors?orange, pink, green, and blue?are available. The cover has a handy locking mechanism to keep the drive closed while it rattles around in your pocket or luggage, and the drive can actually be removed from the cover and swapped out for one with?more memory without your?having to purchase the entire product over again.

The "Flight" moniker comes from the fact that there is no knife component to this Swiss Army flash drive. Other models include a folding blade, but anyone who regularly deals with the TSA knows that you don't want your data to be confiscated at the airport.

The drive is also very slim, measuring 0.3 by 0.6 by 2.3 inches (HWD)?the same size as a keychain Swiss Army knife?and weighs only 0.4 ounce. No worries about blocking other ports when using the drive?this USB device is about as small as it gets.

Despite the small size, you'll be getting anywhere from 4GB to 64GB of storage capacity, with models ranging between $40 (for the 4GB model) to $225 (for the 64GB model). Our review model, the 4GB version, costs $10 per gigabyte, which is pricey, to be sure. The cost per?gigabyte lowers as the capacity?increases, with the 64GB model coming out to roughly $3.51 per gigabyte.

Features and Performance
The Slim Flight (4GB) comes with some software preinstalled, courtesy of Victorinox. The software includes encryption tools, zero-footprint anonymous browsing, password management, and automatic file backup. These sorts of tools are invaluable when travelling for business, where you may be separated from your laptop or don't have consistent access to any one PC. Unfortunately, these tools are Windows only.

Setting up the encryption is simple, but it does involve a few minutes and multiple steps, so be prepared to spend some time with the installation wizard. First you set up a password for the drive. Next, you have the option of creating an encrypted partition on the drive. When you set up the encryption, the wizard includes a slider that lets you choose how much of the drive you want to encrypt. You can choose anywhere from the full capacity of the drive to as little as 10MB.

The software also includes options for Internet browsing, letting you either sync your favorites and bookmarks between multiple computers or browse safely on any system. The safe browsing mode opens up its own copy of Internet Explorer in "no trace" mode which, as the name implies, leaves no traces of your browsing on the PC. The safe browsing utility also lets you delete the history, cookies, favorites, and temporary files of either the local Internet log files or the USB-based browser. Extending the online communication tools further, there's also a tool to back up and sync your Outlook files to and from the USB drive.

In performance tests, the Swiss Army Slim Flight scored 631 points in Futuremark PCMark 7's storage benchmark, slightly ahead of the Kingston DataTraveler Locker+ (8GB) ($14 street, 4 stars), which scored 623. Despite the slightly better performance, and identical read speeds (24.52 MBps), the Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight has a slower write speed. In our timed test transferring 4.93GB of data, the Slim Flight had a write speed of 5.82MBps, while the DataTraveler Locker+ pulled ahead with a speed of 9.65MBps.

All in all, the Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight is the sort of drive you want to buy if you aren't worried about losing your flash drive. It's attractive, but not too bulky to carry on your key ring. It's filled with goodies like bookmark syncing, password management and easy to use encryption. It's also a bit more expensive than generic drives, without being dramatically faster. It's a smart buy, but you'll pay for what you're getting.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/CFtuiOka2V4/0,2817,2400504,00.asp

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