14 DAY TRIAL // You might think it odd that we would imply that the USB 3.0 technology was rare on the flash drive market, and you would be right. However, it's not the whole flash drive market that we're looking at here, but the OTG series. Panram is among the few companies that offer SuperSpeed support.
USB On-the-Go is a technology that allows flash drives to treat tablets and smartphones, anything with Android 4 and older OS, as they would a host PC.
A microUSB connector is provided for this purpose, though most OTG flash drives unveiled this year have had both a full-sized port and a microUSB one.
The problem lies in the USB standard normally employed by such devices, not the physical aspects themselves, exactly.
You see, USB OTG has mostly been allowed on the USB 2.0 technology, which is limited to 480 Mbps throughput at a time.
SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology allows for 5 Gbps (4.8 Gbps really), which is ten times better than USB 2.0.
Alas, SuperSpeed 3.0 seldom comes in microUSB form factor, so there are very few USB OTG flash drives based on it.
Panram has just launched one though, or rather a whole series, called Panram GT1, where GT stands for Go Travel.
In a way, they are akin to the Stellar Boost XT and Lite Flash Drives from Patriot, which only came out a few days ago.
Anyway, the Panram GT1 have 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB capacities, and reach transfer speeds of up to 85 MB/s.
Well, the read speed goes that high, while the writing speed is, unfortunately, limited to 20 MB/s if we're reading the announcement right. Do keep in mind that the less space a drive has, the slower it is.
The Panram GT1 drives weigh 3.2 grams each and, as we've come to expect from such things, have a micro USB port on one end and a full connector on the other. Or perhaps we should say that the other end is the USB 3.0 port. That’s right, you just have to plug the whole thing in an I/O connector. They're that small.
Not that Panram could have afforded to try anything else. USB OTG produces are all supposed to be small and light like that.
The packaging is about as large as two hands, so you can get a feel of the size of the product just by looking at it. Finally, the design of the cap covering the microUSB port will make it easy to hang the thing from a keychain or lanyard.