Introduction

We’ve had the opportunity in the past to work with Super*Talent products; they are most know for their high end DDR2/3 modules but have also been actively pushing their SSD line-up.

Of course they haven’t ignored the mainstream demand for portable and compact storage devices, their USB drive line-up is quite complete.

In this review we’ll focus on one product from their Pico series, the smallest USB stick in the world? At only 31.3mm in length, it might well be.



Yes you’ve read the package right, this small stick can hold up to 8Gb of data! This particular model is the Pico-C, which is also water-resistant and quite durable.

Specifications

From their product page we gathered the following details on the Super*Talent Pico

Capacities: 1,2,4,8Gb

Weighs less than 6g

Up to 30MB/s (200X) data transfer rate

Fully compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1

Powered by USB bus - no external power is required

Durable solid-state storage - 10 years data retention

Hot Plug & Play – enable you to install and uninstall Pico anytime

PICO-A: 38.7x12.4x3.9mm

PICO-B: 31.8x18.8x4.4mm

PICO-C: 31.3x12.4x3.4mm

Let’s take a closer look, we’ll definitely need macro mode for this product ->

Looks and Usage

Inside the package you’ll find a small metal chain to carry the stick around; funny thing is that the chain is almost bigger than the USB drive itself.



To really illustrate the remarkably small size of this USB drive, we placed it next to a 4Gb Kingston DT HyperX.



Plugged in to a system you can see the drive is smaller than your average USB connector!



Wear

We hooked up the Pico-C to our keychain for a few weeks to see how it would take the daily abuse of the other metal devices on the keychain. It will definitely not cause any extra weight or a size issue, that’s for sure!



The metal surface of the Pico drive got scratched pretty, the USB connector remained functional though, which is the important part. We did encounter an issue with the metal chain, which is not as strong as expected; we had the chain snap twice when it got caught up somewhere and we tried to pull it loose. In the looks departement a black string might not score as high, but for weight/strength we definitely advise it.



Can this small drive stand up to the big ones performance wise? ->

Test Setup and Comparison Material

The Pico-C sticks was compared to:

• Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 4gb
  
• Sandisk Cruzer Mini 512Mb
  
• Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 4GB
  
• Sandisk U3 Contour 4Gb
  
• Sandisk U3 Cruzer Micro 4Gb
  
• Corsair Voyager 4Gb
  
• Corsair Voyager GT 16Gb
  
• OCZ Rally2 32Gb

The following test setup was used with Windows XP SP2 installed; we used ATTO HDD Benchmark v2.34 and HDTach 3.0 to measure performance:

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	XFX Geforce 8800 GTX Coolermaster Real Power M520 520W PSU 2x Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD

Performance

Let’s start with the HDTach’s random access time test:



Access times are lower than current generation hard drives, but compared to the other new USB sticks the drive is lagging behind.



The HDTach read speed test shows impressive numbers for the small Pico drive, at ~30Mb/s it matches what was claimed by Super*Talent and it’s on par with much larger USB drives.

ATTO HDD Benchmark allows you to test the performance of a storage media by measuring the time it takes to read or write a file of 256Mb; the difference with other HDD benchmark is that ATTO will read/write that data file in different size chunks, going from 0.5Kb to 8192Kb. In our test we used 4kb to 8912Kbsetting.

The smaller transfer sizes are applicable for overall Windows operation like Page File actions (~4kb) and small file transfers (.inf , .ini, .dll files). Larger 100Mb+ files are transferred in much larger chunks. Normally you can expect that hard drives do rather well with small chunks, better than SSD in any case, once the file transfer size increases performance will go up for SSD/HDD and USB sticks.

If you want to run an applications straight of your USB stick, high performance at small transfer size is important. If you plan to use it primarily to transfer large files, file transfer speed at chunks of 512Kb are more important.

Let’s see how these USB sticks did in the READ test:



Very impressive read numbers here, the Pico-C comes in 2nd, only a hair length behind the Corsair Voyager. The read speed at smaller file chunks is quite remarkable.



Super*Talent warned us that write speeds were nothing too special, this test places the Pico in the middle of the pack at ~12Mb/s write speed. It would take a little bit more than 20 minutes to completely fill the drive.

Conclusive Thoughts

We are quite impressed from the get-go with the Super*Talent Pico USB drive; they managed to squeeze up to 8Gb of data storage into a compact and robust enclosure which passed through our stress tests undamaged; however the metal chain used to hook up the USB drive was less impressive and should be swapped out for a stronger model (or use a nylon string).

Looks wise this is the definitely the most sexy key to grace our keychain yet. We got tons of remarks on it, from both sexes. The Pico wouldn’t look bad as decoration on a necklace.



Of course its diminutive size is both a positive and negative. On the upside this drive takes up hardly any room and weighs practically nothing. On the downside this drive is so compact that if you happen to drop/misplace it somewhere you might not find it again. When the Pico’s chain snapped it fell under a car seat, it took quite some time to find and retrieve it.

Overall though it’s hard not be impressed by this device; available at a competitive price of $30/€35 for the 8Gb version ($17 for 4Gb, $10 for 2Gb). The fact that its also shows impressive read speed results (yet average write speeds) is icing on the cake.

Super*Talent Pico-C Recommended for

+ Extremely Compact
+ Very Durable Design
+ Competitively Priced
+ High Performance for Read instructions
- Extremely Compact (can get lost)
- Included metal chain not very strong
- Average Write Performance

We thank Amy at Super*Talent for making this review possible.