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Most of you out there have at least one USB drive that you use to take your stuff from place to place, and I bet it's a plain looking thing. It's probably plain black and plastic, or maybe colored, and possibly rubber, depending on which one you have, the common denominator here is that most USB drives look pretty much the same, small and rectangular pieces of plastic, with some variations here and there.

Lately though many USB drives have come out that look nothing like a standard USB drive, they look like regular ordinary objects, sort of camouflaged if you will, to not resemble their techie counterparts. You can get them to look like toys, shoes, jewelry, sushi and many other things. Point here is that they don't look like a USB drive at all, they are disguised to look like everyday objects.

Today for review I've got the Teddy Bear 1GB USB Drive, and it's exactly what it sounds like, a cute and cuddly stuffed animal with a USB drive inside of it. So it's a cute stuffed Teddy Bear that doubles as a USB drive, but it's also a bit disturbing as well, read on to see what I mean by that...

Features

• Hi-Speed USB 2.0 certified, backward compatible with USB 1.1
• Plug and Play, Hot-Swapped capability
• Mass Storage Device class compatible.
• Support: Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and Mac OS
• Dimensions: 8cm x 9.5cm tall (approx.)
• Weight: 20g
• Capacity: 1GB
• Price: US$ 17.00

A Better Look at Things

The Teddy Bear USB Drive comes in a nice plastic box, kinda resembles the box that my iPod nano 4th came in actually. It's a nice little box really that can be reused for whatever.

The Teddy Bear itself is brown as one would expect a teddy bear to be, he's sporting a nice big red bow as well, and he's smiling too. It seems well made really, I've pulled on his arms and legs and they seems attached very well, but then I pulled on his head and it came off to reveal the USB connection.

Yeah, so you pull this cute little Teddy Bear's head off to access the USB drive...

Installation, Testing and Comparison

As if pulling the Teddy Bear's head off isn't disturbing enough, when you actually use him, it looks like his head is jammed into your USB port, and that you've got this cute little bear stuck inside of your computer... a bit sadistic it is.

Needless to say I think, but it looks pretty bad when you've got a stuffed Teddy Bear sticking out of your computer, people might start to talk about you if they see something like this... but I like him, I think he's rather cool, my three year old son loves Teddy Bears and he wants him as well, he was all excited to see the 'baby bear' when I first got him. He was also rather excited about the fact that he could pull his head off, not sure if I should be worried about that or not...

So yes it's a Teddy Bear, but it's also a USB drive, so let's see how it performs shall we?

I've put it up against a few other 1GB USB drives and I threw in my OCZ Rally2Turbo 4GB drive as well to show them compared to a fast USB drive.

There are two main tests that I run on USB drives, the first one is SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP2 Removable Storage Benchmark.

Here's an explanation of how it works and what the things mean you'll see in th following graph:

Combined Device Index is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the Combined Index figures over the four file sizes (Higher is better, i.e. better performance).

Endurance Factor is a figure representing the Wear and Life Expectancy of flash devices; this is obtained by dividing the average performance (normal condition, i.e. sequential write) to the lowest performance (high-stress condition, i.e. same block re-write).

It measures the relative improvement of endurance caused by the wear levelling or flash management algorithm; the absolute endurance of a device (i.e. its expected life-time) is directly dependent, in addition to this Endurance Factor, on the nominal manufacturer rating of maximum erase/reprogram cycles, which is typically 100,000+ for SLC and 10,000+ for MLC devices (Higher is better, i.e. longer life-time for the device).

As you read Higher is Better, so the graph is organized Worst to Best scores:

As you can see according to this test that the Teddy Bear actually scores pretty well, coming in second.

Let's take a closer look though at a part of the test, the 256MB Files test.

Again here's a brief explanation of what things in the chart mean, ordering is Worst to Best again.

Read Performance: expressed both in terms of Operations per Minute (i.e. the number of files read per minute)

Write Performance: similarly expressed both in terms of Operations per Minute (i.e. the number of files written in a minute)

Well here things changed a bit, the Teddy Bear actually moved down to third place for this test, apparently the Toughdrive is better at handling the large files than the Bear is.

The next test I like to use for USB drive is DiskBench, this test gives us actual time in seconds to complete a task, I think time is something that people can understand more readily than numbers like Sandra puts out.

For my testing I like to test Copy To or Write to, Copy From and Read From, these I feel are the most common things that people will do with a USB drive. DiskBench also gives us the actual transfer rates as well in MB/s so we can tell if it meets or exceeds manufacturers specs.

For the tests I use a 350MB .AVI Video file.

The first graph I have for you is the time it took to complete the tasks, ordering is best to worst using the Copy To or Write Speed as the reference for ordering. Since it's time, lower is better of course.

As you can see it takes over 90 seconds to Copy the file to the Teddy Bear, that's fairly long, but nowhere near as long as the slower two drives take. The read speed though of the Teddy Bear isn't too bad overall.

Here's another graph showing the transfer rates for the tests, ordering again is best to worst, transfer rates are of course higher equals better, ordering is again based off write speeds.

Again we see the Read speeds aren't too bad really with the Teddy Bear, but the Write speed is horrible, coming in at 3.66MB/s, though as you can see, there are worse results with other similar products...

Summary

The Teddy Bear USB Drive isn't something you'd want if you're in a hurry that's for sure, but if you're looking for a USB drive that doesn't look like a USB drive then this is it, it's cute and cuddly, and can sit on your desk and no one will know it's a USB drive.

Of course though it is bit disturbing really, and those out there with a sadistic streak might really like it as well!

Overall though, as I said, I like it, it's unique, it might not be the fastest out there, but it's certainly different.

Pros

• Cute and cuddly
• Faster than other competitors
• Relatively fast read speeds
• Inexpensive really for what it is
• Seems well made

Cons

• Disturbing....
• Slow overall

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