14 DAY TRIAL // Most of the flash drives released over the past few weeks, at least the ones that made enough waves to reach the news, were of the dual-port variety, but Silicon Power decided it was time to release a normal one.
Not that “normal” is the perfect term to refer to the new Jewel J80. After all, the drive has both an unusual shape and a metallic casing instead of the regular plastic flash drives commonly use.
The company wanted it to adopt a “modernism style,” hence the metal casing and the integration of the lanyard hole into the case itself.
Normally, the hole is small, just enough for the strap or key chain to go through, but you can probably fit a fingertip inside this one. It will let you play with it while you wait for something or other, if nothing else.
The performance of the flash drive
The Silicon Power Jewel J80 boasts the USB 3.0 interface standard, which means that while the Universal Serial Bus controller fits any USB port, past and present (like USB 2.0 and USB 1.1), it's USB 3.0 ports that will allow the drive to work best.
The company didn't actually specify the transfer speeds you can look forward to, mostly because no one does it much for these storage units, unless they're really fast.
However, we're reasonably sure that you'll get at least 135 MB/s transfers when reading from the drive, and maybe 100 MB/s when writing.
These are optimistic figures, of course, even though they don't even come close to the 650 MB/s allowed by the 5 Gbps bandwidth. NAND Flash chips and controller ICs used in flash drives can't use that full potential.
It's likely that the full speed won't be attained before USB 4.0 comes around really, the same way USB 2.0 speed only started to be used fully in USB 3.0 ports. The standards simply advance faster than storage technologies can keep up.
Availability
The SP Jewel J80 has a capless design and a metallic zinc alloy gray case that makes it look like a fashion accessory. You'll be able to find it in 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB capacities, bundled with the SP Widget software (backup and security) and a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security. The Recuva File Recovery technology will let you even restore accidentally deleted files.
Prices haven't been mentioned, unfortunately, or the selling date, which usually means that retailers might start listing them in a matter of days.