ATP Petito and TouchDrive USB Flash Drives

ATP ToughDrive 2GB
Street Price: $27

Specifications

• Observed dimensions: 75 x 10 x 21mm

• Observed weight: 17gms

• USB 2.0 Compatible

• Available in 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB sizes

• Water proof

• Shock proof

• Included Disk Security Utility

• Synthetic Polymer Coated (Rubber like coating)

• One year warranty

The Unit

ATP's ToughDrive is a standard sized thumb drive.  What gets your attention and sets it apart from a number of other drives is its rubber coating.  ATP calls this a 'Synthetic Polymer Coating"...  Calling it rubber coated makes for a clearer picture in my book however.  This is a drive that clearly is shock resistant and with it being water proof can be used in your favorite drinking game at the frat house if you lose your quarter.

  

Speaking of quarters, let's give you an idea of scale as we did with the Petito.  There is a small hole is the rubber outer covering of the drive itself so it can we worn on a lanyard.  This hole is immediately above the amber drive activity light.

  

Found on the drive

Before we move on to testing, I want to point out that on each drive was a USB Drive Utility.  This small program allows for partitions and password protections to be put on all or just a portion of the drive.  With thumb drives being so portable, having a layer of security on them only makes good sense.

Performance

To have a look at the drive's performance we are going to use the HD Tach program.  HD Tach will give us average read and burst speed in MB/sec as well as random access speed times.  Most flash drives are used in business type machines.  My AMD Turion MT-40 powered Acer laptop will serve nicely in this capacity.  First up is the ATP Petitio. 

The average read time and random access time is the same of our OCZ Rally2 Turbo we reviewed a week or so back.  Let's see how the ATP ToughDrive does.

Now this is surprising.  I didn't expect to see the Petito Drive show a 20% faster read time than the ToughDrive.  This is in part why we added in some old fashioned stopwatch benchmarking to our flash drive testing.  Using a 720MB folder of jpeg images, we timed how long it took to write these images from hard disk to flash drive.  Our reigning speed champ is the OCZ Rally2 Turbo drive in 4GB trim at 2:01.  After running the same bench five times on each drive and throwing out the fastest and slowest speeds, we averaged the remaining three.  The ATP Petito which gave us a such nice numbers with HD Tach took 3:51 to transfer the file while the ToughDrive gave a much speedier 2:38.

Conclusion

Both the ATP Petito and ATP ToughDrive are nice units that get the job done.  Performance was seen as average.  The Petito's "grab ya" claim is its size.  Priced at $50 for such a very portable 2GB unit, it is a hard item to ignore.  While you won't catch me wearing a pink one on a chain around my neck, you may see another color hooked onto my key ring.  The 2GB ToughDrive has a bit more going for it with its faster speed and rubberized coating that makes it a far more durable item.  Add in the street price of $27 and it becomes very attractive. 

ATP's line of products represent a full spectrum of solutions to data storage and portability problems.  The Petito and ToughDrive are a few answers of many available.  Given the merits of each, neither would leave you upset about the purchase.

BACK                    HOME