This PNY flash drive has been a workhorse for me for the past 8 months. I'm a realtor and use it to keep my contracts and photographs synchronized from my home office and my business office. Using my PNY flash drive and the bundled Microsoft Briefcase application, I'm able to do it easily. My PNY drive is ALWAYS in my pocket with my many keys and cards - scratched and banged constantly. Never a problem, never a hitch. When I upgrade to the 1GB drive, why would I buy another brand? Right, I will not.
Bought this last weekend at BJs through a coupon. Brought it home plugged it in and saw the drive capacity to be 480MB instead of 512MB. Drives usually show lower than what is advertised, but not too low as 480MB when the advertised capacity is 512MB.
Called support, found that they dont have a toll free number, put on hold for extended period of time, tech support guy cut me in the middle twice saying he was getting an incoming call from a Senior Engineer. Finally after he had listened to the problem he asked me to open and see the drive properties (showed 503316480 bytes) and argued somehow it was 500MB. I had to pull out my calculator and show him that is 480MB ((503316480/1024)/1024) and not 500MB, to which he mumbled it could be a defective piece and suggested I return it back to the store. I am still waiting for BJs to replenish their stock. I will try it once more and if I find similar results, I will never ever buy another PNY product.
This is my first day using this product, so far so good. It does what the product description says it should do. However, the photograph above is of a product that may exist out there, but not of the product I have, even though it certainly IS a PNY 512 Mb USB portable drive. The shape/design is a little different, but more importantly:
1. No write/delete protection switch. If you look at the photo above and expect it to have the same switch that prevents deletion, which is present on all the other models of lower capacity by PNY - you won't find it.
2. The lanyard on all the other similar PNY products is attached to the body of the stick, whereas on mine the lanyard attaches only to the cap. There's the potential danger that the stick may drop out of its own weight (though the cap attaches to it quite securely). If you're worried about this, carry it in your shirt pocket and use the pretty lanyard for something else.
3. The ton of information that comes on a minidisk for this product is useless, they all talk about the other models that look like the photo above. For one thing, there's a green led and a yellow led, and I'm left to guess that the difference is that one lights up for USB 1.1 connections and the other for USB 2.0 connections, or that one lights up for Windows 2000 and the other for WinXP - who knows. Worse, there is NOBODY TO TALK TO. I can't find a link on the PNY site to communicate with their tech support, you'll find lots of FAQs but no one to talk to if you have questions.
4. What drive letter is assigned to it when you use it on Windows systems - a total mystery. It comes up as D on one system and E on another - I suspect it finds the first available letter above C and uses that. I did assign it a specific letter on one system, but it still came up as another letter on a different machine, and I won't know until I'm back at the first system if that means I need to start re-assigning drive letters every time I use it on a different system.
If it turns out that it does find the first available letter, that's a vast improvement on previous versions, but it would be nice to have that documented somewhere.
Other than that, it works as advertized, I'm happily transferring files back and forth.
Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I make the point about the difference between the product and the photo above, Amazon was kind enough to update the photo. Just so there are no doubts, as of this writing, what you see is what you get.