14 DAY TRIAL // Flash drive units continue to come out often, especially now that NAND Flash memory chips have gotten so very small and energy efficient. PNY has just released its latest such invention.
Said invention is called PNY Wave 3.0 and, as the name suggests, features the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface standard.
That means that it's not limited to 480 Mbps transfers, unlike USB 2.0. Then again, that doesn't mean that it works at 5 Gbps either.
Sure, that's the top transfer speed allowed by USB 3.0, but few, if any, storage devices actually manage to use it all.
Case in point, the PNY Wave 3.0 USB Flash Drive can read at up to 80 MB/s but will never be able to write data at more than 20 MB/s.
It's all owed to a combination of controller limitations and low number of chips to write on at once. If this was, say, an SSD made of various MLC NAND chips, it could have gone much faster, on both counts.
But we digress. The PNY Wave 3.0 is still 5 times faster than a comparable USB 2.0 flash drive. Half of what it could be, which isn't that bad at all.
Moving on, the PNY Wave 3.0 USB Flash Drive has a capless design involving a slide-out mechanism. Whenever you're not using the thing, the port will be hidden and protected in the main body.
The lack of cap won't really do any wonders against dust, but the same can be said about pretty much every PC I/O Panel out there too, so it's not like PNY is making any sacrifices here.
Finally, the newcomer will, of course, work on USB 2.0 and older ports as well, with the expected performance limitations.
PNY Wave 3.0 is only up for sale in the UK right now, in 16 GB (£19.99 / $32.63 / €24.01), 32 GB (£29.99 / $49.95 / €36.03) and 64 GB capacities (£59.99 / $97.92 / €72.07).