Movies have promoted some strange products over the years. Remember the ET collectors cups, Superman underwear and Batman fly swatters?.... you name it, movie companies have made money slapping their logo on the side it. And so why not a USB drive?Supertalent's 16GB USB drive is a standard memory stick with quick data access rates of about 30MB/s, or 200X, encased in a tough black-ruberized case. The only difference is that this USB drive promotes Paramount Pictures 1972 film classic, The Godfather.

The aptly named "Godfather" USB memory stick measures 49 x 20 x 9mm in size. It has one red LED to indicate data transfer activity and is USB1.1 and USB2.0 compatible. The drive works with all recent Windows 2000/XP/Vista operating systems and can be used for Vista's Readyboost.

The simple rubber casing is nice, serving as a backdrop for The Godfather movie logo on one side, and a silhouette of Marlon Brando's face on the opposite. The rubber case has a hole for the key chain to fit through, securing a rather loose plug for the removable end cap. If you store the end cap this way you will quickly loose that end cap. The only other thing to mention about this Supertalent 16GB USB drive is that it comes with 17 different low resolution posters from the movie, in a few different languages. Supertalent's Godfather-series USB drive retails for about $35USD ($40CDN) through newegg.

Supertalent "The Godfather" 16GB USB Drive Includes: key chain cap.

We've tested a couple different USB flash drives at PCSTATS recently and the main spec you'll want to watch out for is peak read and peak write speeds for the 256MB test. These are the numbers that manufacturers quote to sell their USB thumb drives.

Not all PCs have USB2.0 ports, so actual performance speeds can differ greatly between computer systems.

SiSoft Sandra 2009	Source:Sandra

Sandra is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system and individual components. The numbers taken though are again, purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance. Higher numbers represent better performance. The best results for each column are bolded.

Sandra 2009 Multi-Filesize Read / Write Tests ( higher numbers are better ) USB Stick Size 512 Byte Test 32 KB Test 256 KB Test 2MB Test 64MB Test 256MB Test Read Write Read Write Read Write Read Write Read Write Read Write PQI Intelligent Stick 512MB 237.92 kb/s 4.27 kb/s 8.65 MB/s 271.47 kb/s 20.11 MB/s 1.87 MB/s 23.5 MB/s 3.07 MB/s 24.53 MB/s 8.53 MB/s 25.6 MB/s 8.53 MB/s Kingston DataTraveler Elite 2GB 247.75 kb/s 25.23 kb/s 8.99 MB/s 2.17 MB/s 18.7 MB/s 7.67 MB/s 20.90 MB/s 9.27 MB/s 21.33 MB/s 9.6 MB/s 21.33 MB/s 8.53 MB/s Supertalent "the Godfather" 16GB 129 kb/s 18 kb/s 5.44 MB/s 944.5 kb/s 19.02 MB/s 5.09 Mb/s 28.17 MB/s 8.6 MB/s 27.73 MB/s 13.87 MB/s 29.87 MB/s 12.8 MB/s Supertalent Luxio (unencrypted) 64GB 179.27 kb/s 15.23 kb/s 5.74 MB/s 1.01 MB/s 20.17 MB/s 5.71 MB/s 28.73 MB/s 11.03 MB/s 29.87 MB/s 16 MB/s 29.87 MB/s 17.07 MB/s Supertalent Luxio (AES encryption) 64GB 144 kb/s 18.08 kb/s 4.22 MB/s 1.06 MB/s 19.93 MB/s 4.95 MB/s 28.17 MB/s 11.83 MB/s 29.87 MB/s 17.07 MB/s 29.87 MB/s 17.07 MB/s

With the Supertalent Godfather-series 16GB we see peak data transfer rates of 29MB/s (read) and 12.8MB/s (write). The CD 1x rating is equivalent to 150kB/s, so this translates to a maximum read speed of 203X and write speed of 85X. The Supertalent Luxio maintained equivalent peak read speeds, but was a little quicker on the write.

Rubberized USB Drive

There's not much to this 16GB USB drive that needs explaining. Plug it in, copy files and folders, carry your data with you. I do find it remarkable how quickly USB memory stick capacities have increased. The first USB drive I owned was 16MB, and it seemed like such and upgrade from the 1.44MB floppy disks that were still commonly used.

(Example of the poster art on the 16GB drive)

After that USB drives quickly leapfrogged from 64MB to 128MB, 512MB and then 1GB, 4GB and now 16GB and 64GB!

USB memory has gotten to the level where you could run an entire operating system off the drive... though don't do that. USB flash memory isn't quite the same as hard drives or solid state drives, and technically speaking after X-number of reads and writes data can no longer be written.

It takes the average person years to write/read that much data onto a USB memory drive.

In any event, with a peak data read speed of 29.87MB/s and write speeds of 12.8MB/s, Supertalent's Godfather-series 16GB USB drive (model STP16GGRBK) is an inexpensive way to carry a lot of data.

It's not the fastest USB drive on the market, nor does it offer any kind of encryption, but for day-to-day data transfer it's hard to argue with $35 for 16GB storage.

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