On the end of the SwissMemory Victorinox you can see the red LED flashlight.  In normal light, it doesn't look like much but in medium to low light situations it actually works quite well.  I have one of these red LED lights on the Swiss Army Knife that I have carried with me for years and I can tell you from experience, it is VERY handy.

Obviously, the light must have a power source.  That power source is a small hearing aid type battery hidden inside the Victorinox.  You can see below that it is removed by pushing a paper clip in a small hole which pops out the battery.

All thumb drive units available come with some security program of one form or another.  Swissbit is no different.  Their program seems fairly comprehensive.  The unit can be partitioned so that part or all of its data area is password protected.  A repair feature is here to attempt to fix any bad data blocks as well as a utility to make the device bootable should you need a boot disk or install a third party device driver such as a SATA driver.

Performance

We want to ensure that the device functions properly otherwise what good would it be?  To test things out we ran the File System Benchmark Test within SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro on the SwissMemory Victorinox and a TX50 USB thumb drive.  This benchmark is not really intended on looking at all out performance but rather to confirm that the unit functions in line with other products of this type.  As a quick aside, Swissbit also produces some high performance USB storage devices called the SwissMemory USB TwistPro which are available in sizes up to 4gb.  As a test bed, we used a pretty standard Toshiba laptop centered around a 2.0gb Celeron processor and 512mb or DDR RAM.  Let's see what we see.

Conclusion

Thumb drives are everywhere and are used as an everyday utility just as a pocket knife is.  So it was only a matter of time before be got a blending of the two.  Victorinox has produced such a unit deserving of the Swiss Army Knife name.  Available in a standard pocket knife version (Extended) or an airport friendly (Travel Safe) version, they have shown this newest Victorinox to be as practical as is it innovative.  The 64mb version is available now for around $65 (USD) with the 128mb version due out by Fall.  This pricing in inline with the flash drive market at present.  Swissbit has put out a quality product that I believe will be exceedingly successful.  With that in mind, we unhesitatingly can give the SwissMemory Victorinox unit our Editor's Choice award as the most versatile and novel USB storage device currently available.

Pros

• Highly portable

• Available in 64 and 128mb versions

• Available in Extended and Travel Friendly versions

• It's a Swiss Army knife!

Cons

• Airport security will love it if you come through a checkpoint with one.

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