Date:
Thursday , September 02, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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VisionTek Xtreme2 GO Drive

While not our usual subject matter, we wanted to look into VisionTek's new USB2 flash drives. If smaller size, bigger storage, and faster transfer sound good to you when it comes to on-the-go storage, these are worth a look. We put it in the washer too.

Introduction

As mentioned in the blurb above, the VisionTek Xtreme2 GO Drive is hardly what we consider HardOCP "core" subject matter, but the fact of the matter is that Kingston deserves credit for making the USB flash drive a part of my life. Now while this is VisionTek's moment to shine in under the harsh lights of a HardOCP review, I have to share with you a little background as to why we are writing about this.

Flash Drive History

I guess it was likely over a year ago that Kingston contacted us and asked us if we wanted to review their DataTraveler flash drive. I gave Kingston the standard, "We don't cover that," but they were still nice enough to send one of their flash drives to me to check out. Since then, that flash drive has traveled all over the world with me and I have to say that it has become a staple in my arsenal of on-the-road toys. Having a 128MB storage stick in your pocket has proved to be incredibly useful on many occasions. No more needing a fragile floppy disks to bend or get beer in. Being able to have heaps of information in your pocket and not having to carry an actual computer with you is great. There have been so many times that wanted to walk out of a meeting with the data we just covered in my hand and the flash drive has many times solved that problem. After seeing all the situations the flash drive was helpful in, it truly became something that I did not want to leave home without and I certainly cursed myself for if I did.

Still all was not perfect. Three issues hindered flash drives during their infancy and those things were size, speed, and price. By size, I mean volume of storage available. While 16MB or 32MB was certainly better than a pile of floppies, it was hardly what many of us needed, especially if there was anything graphical to be stored. While flash drives started to get bigger in storage size, the USB interface started to show that is was sort of “slow.” OK, it was not that slow, but if you were moving bigger files on and off a stick that was 128MB in size, it could take you over a couple of minutes to do so. Lastly, these things were expensive. The smaller sticks were sort of affordable, but they truly did not have the capacity to fit my needs and the 128MB flash drives could be incredibly expensive.

With the advent of prolific USB2.0, a.k.a. High Speed USB, we started seeing USB2 compatible flash drives show up on the market. But they were just that, they worked with USB2 technology, they just did not actually take advantage it. In other words you could plug the flash drive into a USB2 port, but it would only transfer data at USB1.1 speeds.

Flash Drive Answers

Today we are going to show you the VisionTek Xtreme2 GO Drive. Yes, these are the same folks that bring your high-end ATI video cards right here in North America. Speaking to them about their new product they explained that they had answered most of the current concerns about flash drives with their new line of Xtreme2 Go Drive products. That said, we were very interested in seeing VisionTek put their money where their mouth was and that is exactly what they did. The immediately sent us over a 128MB and a 1GB Xtreme2 GO Drive and the first thing we did was take them on a 3000 mile round trip journey. Benchmarks are great, and we will get to those for sure, but the experience and utility that the hardware provides makes all the difference.