PQI Card Drive U510 1GB Review

Package Content
- Card Drive 1GB
- Pouch
- 2' USB extension cable
- Quickstart guide
- Instruction card

Slim and Silvery
There's something to be said about simple aesthetics in hardware. Perhaps it's the calmer state of mind, the lack of people staring at it, or the fact it just looks that much cooler. Similar to Apple's laptops, the Card Drive U510 bears a no-frills sleek appearance, brandishing a brushed metal exterior with a mirror-finish logo and capacity size on two of the front corners.

The retractable USB connector is cleverly hidden away into the underside of the card, and pulls out to reveal an also-silver flexible ribbon cable for plugging into some tight spaces. About the thickness of three credit cards, the Card Drive U510 easily fits in most wallets, and has the perfect height and width to ensure easy sliding in and out of pockets. Finally, there's a bright blue LED connector on the topside of the USB connector that turns solid when there's a connection and flashes when data is being transferred.

As far as durability goes, I was a little concerned with the sticky noise (much like scotch tape) I heard when I squeezed the flat sides of the card. After all, most men keep their wallets in the back pocket, and when you figure in the long freeway commute 5 days a week, that's a lot of abuse this poor drive has to endure. After doing all the juicy bits of the review, I decided to put the U510 in the hot seat. Stored in my back pocket with my wallet, I took my usual hour drive to and from work, plus all the drives to client sites in between. By the end of the day, I noticed that the right edge of the card was slightly open. Being the curious geek I am, I pried the rest open.

Inside, I saw the PCB with slots for 8 memory chips (mine uses Hynix memory), the USBest controller, and reinforcing plastic that should prevent the board from cracking under the bigger-boned of our fast food society. The underside of the backplate was coated with an adhesive that happened to lose its stickiness. No wonder it opened partway. While I'm fairly certain that the card can handle everyday life, if it should open for you a tiny application of super glue along the edges of the reinforcing plastic or plain old duct tape should do the trick. Meanwhile, PQI needs to look into a stronger adhesive.

Second-Rate Software
A growing trend in flash cards recently is a bundled application suite, and the U510 is no exception. PQI bundles their "USB Notebook" with the card, a trendy windows-only application suite that syncs, stores, and secures your data in one. It works much like a U3 flash drive, using a portion of the memory for a virtual CD-ROM device so Windows can autorun the USB Notebook application. Once loaded for the first time, a window will appear asking for an initial password. Every time afterwards that the drive is plugged in, a small icon appears in your system tray that once clicked on will prompt you for your password then open the main menu with your mugshot up top.

The suite doesn't offer the portable application abilities of U3 or Ceedo, however, focusing solely on portable browsing, email, and document storage. To start with, USB Notebook offers Mobile Browser, a portable Internet Explorer that keeps your favorites with you on the go. I was a little surprised when I discovered that's all it does, though. Unlike Portable Firefox and Stealth Surfer, Portable Browser does not act as a secure browser. History and cache files are not kept on the flash drive, nor does the software even bother deleting them from the local computer's hard drive once it's finished.

Accompanying the Mobile Browser is Web Account, a secure yet annoying password manager for IE. While it does support different websites I tried and their various logon schemes, it suffers from one major flaw. It doesn't recognize when IE navigates to a site with a saved password. Rather, you have to first open the USB Notebook menu, click on the Web Account button (and enter your password, each and every time), then select which site you want to log-in to, or select "From List" to have an oversized 528x440 window force its way to the front of the screen. Hardly convenient.

Also included is Mobile E-mail, a portable Outlook Express that keeps all your emails and contacts handy on the go, and off the local machine's hard drive. This is perhaps the one component of USB Notebook I actually like, since the alternative of using Thunderbird still has some quirks to be ironed out.

The one handy bit that ties all of these together is the Sync Center, supporting 1-way and mixed-way synchronization of your favorites, mailboxes, address book, and My Documents folder. Synchronized items in the My Documents folder can be somewhat filtered for those with large folders, optionally excluding files that haven't been changed in the past X days, or excluding sub-folders.

Now please know that absolutely none of these files are secure in the event the Card Drive U510 gets stolen. However, there is a Zipper-Locker utility for vital files that need to be encrypted, which automatically applies Zip compression to any file dragged into the vault. The way it works is when Zipper-Locker is clicked, an image will be mounted onto a hidden folder located at X:\My Security Doc, which can be browsed into but not saved in, supporting drag-and-drop transfers only. While better than nothing, I find the Zipper-Locker flakey at best, often giving me a zany error message that the aforementioned mount point can't be found.

Rounding off the USB Notebook Suite is the PC-Lock utility, which essentially turns the Card Drive into a security token for a specified number of hours that when removed, locks the computer until the Card Drive is reinserted or a password is typed in. Sounds nifty, eh? It's not. As a computer technician by day, I feel it is my duty to let you know just how worthless this extra "security" really is. I can bypass it in less than 5 seconds. Here's how:

The PC-Lock simply forces a fullscreen password window on top of everything else on your monitor, so prying eyes can't mess around while you're getting coffee. Or so you thought. By holding Ctrl-Shift-Esc, one can repeatedly force the Windows Task Manager to the front, at which point it's just a matter of finding the mouse, clicking the process tab, selecting USBNB.exe and ending the process. That's all there is to it. If you really want to lock your computer, then at least do it the right way. Setup a Windows password and press the Windows Key + L.

Finally, while this won't matter to most people, I thought I'd mention it anyway. For one reason or another, as soon as the Card Drive is plugged in, a "USBest Service Zero" that points to %systemroot%/system32/UTSCSI.exe is installed on the host computer without permission. As far as I know it doesn't do anything, mainly because it can't even start. Expect to see the occasional error in the Event Viewer because of this, which is how I found it. Nothing is mentioned about it on USBest or PQI's websites, let alone Google.

Performance
While read speeds of the Card Drive U510 were tolerable, write speeds were unusually low, so expect some delays when moving large files or running portable applications such as Firefox from the card drive. As you can see for yourself in the benchmarks below, it would appear that you're paying for PQI's credit card form factor more than anything, not raw performance.

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark

The Bottom Line
In the end, the deciding factor on whether or not to pick up the U510 comes down to how much you dig the new Card Drive form factor. While the performance is sub-par compared to the other offerings on the market, a stronger adhesive is needed and the bundled software is just pitiful, PQI has nonetheless succeeded in creating a highly scalable flash drive that breaks out of the ordinary. For utilitarians looking to get the best bang for the buck, keep looking. For those willing to shell out $10-20 more for the portability and unique style, go for it. Meanwhile this reviewer is keeping his fingers crossed for a Revision B that combines the best of both worlds.

By Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor