X-bit labs

A-DATA i-Drive USB 2.0 Disk + PC Camera Review (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 10/04/2004 | 07:46 AM ]

The standard USB Flash Disk utility allows partitioning and formatting the disk. You can also protect the data on the disk with a password or use the drive as a bootable device in one of the three modes as illustrated above.

The CAMagic utility supports the camera capacity of the i-Disk. You enable the video mode by clicking the icon in the top-right corner of the program’s window. The parameters of the video mode can be adjusted in the appropriate menus. The maximum possible resolution is 640x480 pixels; the capturing speed is 30 frames per second (in resolutions up to 320x240). The image can be recorded as a video clip or as independent stills in JPEG, BMP or TIFF format. The quality of the stills is similar to what you have with an ordinary middle-range Web camera. The utility’s options allow processing the image to improve its quality, change dimensions and so on. Well, of course the quality of the stills is determined by the technical parameters of the camera, after all – you can’t improve it better than that.

Now that I’ve introduced the device to you, here’s a piece of technical info. The storage capacity of the i-Disk is 128MB and it supports the USB 2.0 interface (in the camera mode, the device is said to work in the USB 1.1 mode). Unfortunately, there’s no information about this product on the manufacturer’s website, so I took these things from the description on the product’s package.

The average retail price of this combo-device is $45.

Testbed and Methods

I used the following programs to test the A-DATA i-Disk drive:

• FC-Test version 1.0;
• AIDA version 3.95.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD, 15GB;
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.

I will compare the performance of the drive to that of other USB flash drives we have tested earlier on our site (see our article called Five Flash Drives with USB 2.0 Interface, for example).