Installation

The Intelligent Stick 2.0 is a plug & play storage device and is compatible with all versions of Windows but also offers support for Mac OS and Linux.  A device driver is provided for those running Win98.  It is quickly recognized in Windows XP once you plug it in for the first time and will appear in your Device Manager under Disk Drives. 

Included in the CD is an app called Intelligent Stick Manager 2, which will allow you to secure the drive as well as make the flash drive bootable.  We did try to boot off the drive by formatting it and setting our BIOS boot order to USB ZIP but could not get it to boot.  We are unsure if this was an issue with the flash drive or the motherboard itself.  I would also like to note that there are additional standalone executable programs on the PQI website for this particular flash drive.  These include:  Email Client, Disk Partition program and a Format program.

Performance

OK, so its size is impressive but how about its performance?  We will use Sandra 2004 Professional to measure its performance.

Sandra 2004 File System Benchmark

Results:  7258kB/s

The results were very impressive and performed slightly above its rated speed.

Sandra 2004 Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark

This is a new benchmarking module available in the new Sandra 2004 suite.  It is especially designed for these small media devices.  The results are expressed in both the terms of Operations per Minute and transfer rate in kB/second.  It is based on file operations such as read, write and delete performance.

Results:  15119ops

Again, the results were very impressive.  It even outperformed our speedy Lexar JumpDrive 2.0.  Out of all the flash drives we have tested, the Lexar JumpDrive was our current champion in our performance tests but the Intelligent Stick 2.0 managed to outperform it by a substantial margin.

Overall, the Intelligent Stick 2.0 is by far the fastest flash drive we have tested.  It is also the only flash drive that has performed to specification.

Conclusion

We were in search of the smallest and fastest flash drive on the market and we have found it!  Not only is it the smallest 2.0 flash drive currently available, but it is the speediest drive we have tested.  Don't let its size fool you, it offers a wide array of features that are not typically found on other models.  The only downside was that we could not make the drive bootable.  Although it does support this feature, we could not get it to work on several test configurations.  If you're in search of a small flash drive that big on features, look no further.  Highly recommended.

The Intelligent Stick 2.0 is available in the following capacities:  128MB, 256MB, 512MB and 1GB.  More information can be found on the PQI website here.

Questions? Comments?  Discuss them here!