Imation Atom Flash Drive 8GB

Looks can be deceiving and Imation’s ‘Atom’ flash drive proves this with ease because despite boasting a miniscule outer frame, it offers a storage capacity of 8Gbytes. The question is does it have anything else under the hood?

Happily, the answer is a solid ‘yes’. The drive ships with Imation’s Lock security software and this allows you to password protect the entire drive or, for more secrecy, create a hidden, secure partition for ultra-valuable data. The software works well in that it’s easy-to-use and is reasonably quick at repartitioning the drive when you want it to. Beyond its security capabilities, the Atom is also Vista ReadyBoost compliant so you have the option of improving your machine’s performance if you’re running Vista.

On the performance front, the Atom proved surprisingly potent across all our tests. Starting with our synthetic HDTach3 benchmark, the drive returned a 0.6ms access time whilst producing average read and burst speed figures of 30.6Mbytes/sec and 32.8Mbytes/sec respectively. These numbers comprehensively trounce the slightly larger – dimensions-wise – Kingston DataTraveler Mini Slim (also reviewed on ITP.net).

The differences grew even bigger in our real world tests. Copying our 1.2Gbyte test file from our test bed to the Atom took just one minute and 20 seconds and copying the same file back to our PC took just 37 seconds. The Kingston in comparison required a long nine minutes and 48 seconds and one minute and 13 seconds.