Imation Atom Flash Drive Review

Recently and quite by accident I have had an Imation Atom Flash Drive grace my presence, at first I was a little apprehensive at the sheer size of the unit, its TINY as you can probably gather from the picture above. (That must be a mighty small paperclip by the way).

To give you more of an idea on just how small this see the picture below.  

As you can see it is significant smaller than other similarly sized drives (my Atom is 4gb).

With its size you would think that it would skimp on features, but I was surprised that it doesn’t, not at all.

Weighing in at only 9 grams, it is 12 mm wide, 4.8 mm deep and only 32 mm high, this is one of the worlds tiniest flash drives yet come in 1gb, 2gb, 4gb and 8gb varieties, best of all they are fast.

To explain just how fast these drives are I could bamboozle you with an impressive graph or a bunch of numbers from your favorite drive benchmarking tool, suffice to say that when you pit this drive head to head to other well known drives of similar size and capacity the Atom really does stand up in the tests, not the fastest of drives but by no means is it the slowest. In fact the Imation Atom can be used as a Vista ReadyBoost drive which usually requires special attention from a flash drive manufacturer to ensure the speed is above average.

I’ve currently been carrying it around on my keys with a bunch of portable apps installed so that if I come across a situation I need some quick storage or a solid set of diagnostic tools I’ve always got them.

In short this thing is darn handy, I’ve already come across a few situations that it would have been handy to have a flash drive on hand, and I’m sure I’ll come across a few more!

Currently you can pick one of these drives up for around $30 for the 4gb model, this might seem a little steep but you are paying for the physical size of the drive rather than its capacity.

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