Customer Reviews

Verbatim TUFF 'N' TINY 8 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive 96816 (Purple)

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

I've had my Verbatim Store 'n' Go Micro 8GB drive for over six months (I bought it before they renamed it TUFF 'N' TINY) and haven't had any problems with it. It has been a reliable, sturdy, and fast storage device, and looks great on my keychain. It's always fun when I plug it in someone else's computer and they go "What the heck is that?" "Did you say EIGHT gig?" "Must've been expensive!"

I was a little worried about buying from a brand name that is not necessarily trusted in the field of flash memory, but my fears were allayed when I plugged it in for the first time and it identified itself as a "Kingston Store 'n' Go", which leads me to believe this device is the product of some collaboration between Kingston and Verbatim, or is an entirely Kingston product that has simply been purchased and rebranded by Verbatim. Either way, I feel better about the device knowing Kingston's name is associated with it in some way.

Just for kicks, I recently ran my drive through its paces using the Xbench benchmarking program for Mac. It clocked at the following speeds:

-Sequential-
Uncached Write: 5.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write: 5.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read: 4.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read: 31.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]

-Random-
Uncached Write: 0.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write: 1.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read: 3.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read: 29.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Update: I've now had my Tuff 'n' Tiny for nearly a year and still continue to love every minute of owning it. It takes a licking and just keeps ticking. If I could add a sixth star to this review, I would.

Another update: Hm, it seems I spoke a little too soon. After one year and one week, my 8GB Tuff 'n' Tiny has finally kicked the bucket. It has the same symptom many have described here--it just stopped being recognized by all my computers. It doesn't show up on the desktop when I plug it into my Mac; there's no dah-donk sound when I plug it into my Windows PC. I'm willing to concede, as others have suggested, that the super-thin Tuff 'n' Tiny may be more sensitive to static shock than other more well-shielded USB drives. However, given that mine lasted over a year with fairly heavy use, I feel like I did get my money's worth out of it, so I've gone ahead and purchased the newly released 16GB edition of the Tuff 'n' Tiny. If I don't have similar luck with the new one, I'll definitely consider docking some stars from my review and selecting a different brand and a larger more well-shielded form factor for my next USB drive. I'll keep you posted.

Yet another update: I've now had the 16GB model for over a year and it's been working great. (And now that I've updated this review, Murphy's Law states it will quit working in about a week. Haha, keep your fingers crossed for me!)

And as a bonus, here are benchmarks from Xbench for the 16GB model:

-Sequential-
Uncached Write: 8.99 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write: 8.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read: 4.51 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read: 20.02 MB/sec [256K blocks]

-Random-
Uncached Write: 0.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write: 0.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read: 3.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read: 18.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]

I'm afraid I have the same story as several of the reviews below. I've had the drive for a few months and now its dead. No activity when its plugged into several different computers. Disk Utilities on Windows, Mac and Linux don't even see the drive. It has become a tiny paperweight I'm afraid. Which is sad because if it had held up, I'd really have loved the thing. It's a great size and I like the SIP setup. I can actually stay on keychain. Of course, if its dead or I can't trust it to not make data disappear what good is is?

Edit - June 20, 2011:

I suppose that since my review is now one of the most helpful I should update it to tell where the story went from here. After the frustration of the first drive dropping dead, I read through the reviews here which noted it had a lifetime warranty. So I emailed Verbatim and got a RMA email. I taped this drive to the letter and mailed it off. A few weeks later I received a brand new drive. It has been on my keychain since without issues. This one has held up fine and actually serves as a copy of my "off-site backup" holding an encrypted copy of my documents and such. It is also good enough for the occasional "let me grab that file from you and take it with".

However, given the issues I had with the first one dropping dead without warning I do make sure that everything on the drive is also stored somewhere else. It is the ultimate in convenience since it weighs next to nothing and there's nothing to break. However, I wouldn't put the only copy of a thesis on this or something. Make sure that if you get one and it stops working it is only a "oh darn" type situation and not a disaster.

I've updated the review to 3 stars (since the first drive was a 1-star and its replacement is a 5-star). Again, I wouldn't trust the device to be bulletproof with data but we've been dealing with that issue since the days of floppies. I think this is a worthy drive if you're careful. I wish I had the 32-gig instead of the 8 but you know how that goes.

I really should have listened to the negative reviews.

I work on both a Mac and a PC (windows nt & vista). It's 6am and I've spent a few minutes getting about 2Gb of documents together to work on at the office on my pc and was MID transfer when the tuff-n-tiny suddenly ejected itself.

This has absolutely never happened to me before. No, it didn't get jostled, there wasn't an earthquake, the flash drive was in my laptop and I was looking at the transfer progress waiting for the estimated time to process. everything was absolutely still--and voila, self eject complete with warning message that a device had been improperly removed.

I then actually removed the drive from the computer, reinserted it now I get the error message 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer'.

I've had it opened and out of the package for all of 10 minutes. And already-a major issue.

update--thought i'd reformat the drive on my PC at work...no dice. the laptop doesn't even register that there's a device in the drive.

Verbatim's getting a call from me then the damn thing's going back to the seller/Amazon.

I'm clocking write speeds of around 17MB/sec and read speeds of around 30MB/sec, both sustained. It's 'tuff', it's definately tiny, AND it's fast!

I really like how small the Tuff N Tiny is; I keep it on my keychain and really like it. Unfortunately, it's not very reliable. My first one failed after 6 weeks. It completely died. Verbatim sent me a replacement and that one failed after a few weeks. The Verbatim replacement process was pretty good. I called up and after some verifying that it was dead, they gave me an RMA # and I sent it back. They sent a replacement about a week later.

on the surface this USB drive seems great. if anything it's TOO small. It's TINY and looks well made. The only problem was, the drive, which was supposed to be a way for me to back up all of my important files and information so that I could carry it with me, stopped working in less than a week. I believe I copied my files to it exactly once before it stopped working. Maybe I got a defective drive, but it doesn't inspire confidence. Once they fix the minor breaking-in-a-week thing, I'll give it five stars

This gadget scores a lot in coolness. It is so light & tiny. It comes with a matching larnyard if you want to hang it in your keychain. The USB drive is color coded as follows: purple for 8g, green for 4g and orange for a 2g. It looks like just a solid piece of plastic. Looks pretty tough as indicated by its name. I love its simple and minimalistic design. I have own a few flash drives or pen drives that I used for my keychain, but either they are big and awkward, but also the caps always get lost in the process. Now, this don't have a cap so there is nothing to lose. The contacts are located on the other side and is completely exposed to achieve its small size. You can plug it either way but will only work one way. But no worry, it will not damage the drive if you plug it the wrong way. It will just do nothing.

This will be my primary drive that I carry everyday. I have already loaded them up with all of my fav apps.

Primary Apps:
Ad-Aware - anti-spyware, AVG Antivirus - antivirus, Firefox Mozilla - browser, FoxitReader - PDF reader
IZArc - completely free zip app, Open Office - office suite, Spybot Search & Destroy - another anti-spyware

Secondary Apps:
Audacity - excellent audio prog, Crap Cleaner, Crossloop - remote computing, CutePDFWriter - PDF write
Daemon Tools - virtual drive, Dvdshrink - back up your DVDs, Gimp - similar to Photoshop, ITunes, Irfanview - Image viewer, Launchy - similar to Quicksilver on Mac
Locknote - password protected note, Picasa - photo organizer, ImgBurn - ISO, Skype - free call, VLC- all-purpose media player, Yahoomsgr

I've used many flash drives and never before had one that just stopped working. This little chip of a drive was so great -- I showed it off and was thankful that I wouldn't lose it since I could attach it to my key ring. Then this week (age 4 months) it quit working. It simply is not recognized by any computer. It doesn't make the "device inserted" noise, or search for a driver, or anything, it is as if it doesn't exist. If it weren't for all the others complaining of the same problem, I would assume I got that one-in-a-thousand bad item (and rate the product higher), but it looks as if this is a common problem. I wish I could order another one because I like it so much, but since I don't want to get stuck with another sudden failure, I'll have to go with something more reliable. :-(

I bought this flash drive so I could set up ReadyBoost
on my Windows 7 system - it's working flawlessly. One
thing to remember - if your flash drive doesn't have
software on it to let you remove it, be sure and run

"Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media"

before you just go and pull it out of the port. That
could be the end of your system recognizing it.

I was excited to buy this product because of the small physical size and huge capacity. Being a Mac user, the bundled software was practically useless to me and so i didn't bother checking. It seemed to be working perfectly until one afternoon while i was copying files to it.... It suddenly displayed an error and that was the end! i tried formatting it several times wit no success. Eventually the flash changed to read-Only and i couldn't do anything with it! Even from terminal using root privileges the thing wont format! Now i feel like i just threw away a $30.
There doesnt seem to be any help out there on the internet to fix it either!