Identity flash drive

First we take a closer look at the flash drive.
The model I got holds 512MB, however it is available with 1GB and 2GB as well. As most flash drives there isn't much to describe feature wise, this stick has a nice display which let you read out free space and the stick's name.

The flash drive is a bar with rounded corners, it looks pretty stylish. It is basically a plastic base with the front glued on, within the front is the display. The cap comes off revealing the USB connector, which makes chaotic people like myself lose it pretty fast.


As you can see there is a circle diagram which shows usage and the actual number of Megabytes that are left. Most of the screen is used for the identity, which holds a maximum of 11 characters. TechPowerUp happens to consist of 11 characters, coincidence?
The little circle to the left of the display is a small activity LED, this flashes when the drive is active.


In the upper right corner there is a little hole, which obviously is meant to put a cord through, however there is no cord in the box. However I did get some free screen wipes in the box as give away gifts. These screen wipes do double as cord, it wouldn't be a bad idea to add one to each stick.


A screen wipe combined with the flash drive seems to make sense.

How does the screen work?

The screen is what sets this stick apart from other sticks, so how does it work? I honestly don't know. However I would guess that it is powered by a small battery or capacitor which is charged via USB.

The data shown on the display, however, comes from the file system. The drive's name is actually what appears on the display and the free space comes right from the file system.
Of course this made me wonder if this stick is limited to FAT32 which it's formatted with when it comes out of the box. Before you can format an USB device as NTFS you have to change the policy of the drive, it can't be set for quick removal. After doing this the drive formatted just fine and worked without any problems. However, the screen was frozen at the state it was at before the format. So if you want to use the stick as NTFS drive you have to accept that it'll become a "regular" stick again.

SD card

Second is the SD card. There is little to say about it. It looks just like any other SD card. It is rated at 150x which promises nice performance. The SD card is available in the same sizes as the flash drive.