Introduction

In the past A-DATA has been making USB sticks with an official license that were themed like the movie Cars, The Incredibles or Mickey.
Now they added a flash drive with a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. Pirates of the Caribbean has been the best-selling movie in 2006. In addition to just the flash drive, buyers will get a set of MSN display pictures and wallpapers.

From the manufacturer A-DATA:

Support USB specification version 2.0 and compatible with USB 1.1
Hot plug and play
No external power or battery needed
LED indication for data access
Windows®98/98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista™ or later
Mac®: OS 9.0 or later
Linux™ : Kernel 2.4 or later

Packaging

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...age1_small.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...age2_small.jpg
The stick comes in a sealed blister pack. On the back you have some product information in multiple languages.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ents_small.jpg
Inside the package you will find the USB stick and a USB extension cable which comes in very handy if you don't want to crawl under your desk every time you attach a USB stick. A driver CD is not included since any operating system since Windows 2000 natively supports USB storage devices. For Windows 9x the driver is available on the A-DATA website.

A Closer Look

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...size_small.jpg
The A-DATA Pirates Flash Drive has about the typical size of a normal USB stick.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick1_small.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick5_small.jpg
On the front of the USB drive you find a print of Captain Jack Sparrow and a shimmering Pirates of the Caribbean Logo. The rear end has a little ring where you can attach a key chain to.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick2_small.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick3_small.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick6_small.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick7_small.jpg
The whole USB stick is made from plastic, so is the cap. The cap fits the stick nicely, there is no risk of losing it when the stick is in your pockets. An activity LED is not available.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ick4_small.jpg
To protect the precious USB stick during production and shipping a transparent plastic foil has been put on the print.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...hine_small.jpg
Depending of the angle of the light, you will see different colored reflections on the USB stick.

Files on the USB Stick

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A.../messenger.jpg
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...wallpapers.jpg
Nine MSN messenger icons and two wall papers are included.

Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

OCZ Rally 1GB
OCZ Mini Kart 1GB
OCZ Roadster 1GB
Super Talent RBST 1GB
Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
SuperTalent RBST 1 GB
A-Data MyFlash PD7 1 GB
A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

We used HDTach in the following two benchmarks.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ges/graph1.gif
The read bandwidth of the Pirates flash drive is about average.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ges/graph2.gif
With an 8.4 ms access time the drive is far from being the fastest, but it is acceptable for most users. The drive will work in ReadyBoost.

To get a feeling how the speed with different sized files is, we used the ATTO disk benchmark.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...mages/atto.gif
Like with all drives, performance gets better, the bigger the data chunks are. Also common to all USB sticks is that writes are slower than reads. Optimum file size is 64KB or bigger for maximum performance. In daily use you will almost never see files smaller than 64KB.
Unfortunately the write performance is extremely low when using smaller chunk sizes, so this drive is best used with bigger files.

Value & Conclusion

<table width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" id="result">
<tr><th>http://www.techpowerup.com/images/dollar.gif</th>
<td>

A-DATA sells the Pirates Flash Drive 2 GB for $28. Prices for other capacities are: $18 (1 GB), $28 (2 GB), $46 (4 GB), $74 (8 GB).

</td>
</tr><tr>
<th>http://www.techpowerup.com/images/thumbup.gif</th>
<td>

Pirates of the Caribbean Theme
Looks
Supports Vista ReadyBoost
Lightweight

</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>http://www.techpowerup.com/images/thumbdown.gif</th>
<td>

Average Performance
Limited Availability (USA/Taiwan/China/HK/Australia/New Zealand/Thailand)

</td></tr>
<tr><th>8.1</th>
<td>
The A-DATA Pirates Flash Drive will sure not break any speed records, but it seems to me that this wasn't the primary engineering focus. It is more for fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies who are willing to spend a few extra bucks to get a USB stick that they find visually pleasing, without compromising performance too much. With the third movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" showing in theatres next month this pen drive could become a great hit.<br />
In our testing we saw that the stick can compete well with many other USB sticks in both bandwidth and access time. The drive is fully Vista ReadyBoost compatible, the included wallpapers and MSN icons are a welcome added value, even though I'd expect those to be googleable soon.<br />
Since the price of the drives is only a few dollars more than a generic no name drive, you should definitely consider the Pirates Flash Drive if you are into the market for a new USB stick and like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
</td></tr>
<tr><th></th><td>http://www.techpowerup.com/images/recommended.gif</td></tr>
</table>