Featuring a sturdy design and middle-of-the-road write speeds, the 8GB PNY Mini Attaché is a respectable flash drive. However, its read speeds are bottom-of-the-barrel and the warranty is lacking on this $25 device.
Design
With its basic black and blue body, the PNY Mini Attaché won’t win any design awards, but we’re fond of the cap that swivels to reveal the USB 2.0 plug, and kept us from losing the top. The flimsy plastic body, however, didn’t feel very resilient.
Performance
While it’s compatible with both Mac and Windows platforms, users can expect only ho-hum performance. The Mini Attaché’s 10.1-MBps read speed (it took 1 minute and 41 seconds to transfer a 1GB folder of mixed media) was the worst we’ve seen in the USB flash drive space—more than 11 MBps below the category average, and almost 24 MBps slower than the OCZ Technology Rally2. However, its 5.1 MBps write speed (3 minutes and 20 seconds) was slightly better; it was slightly less than 3 MBps below the thumb drive average. Still, it was notably slower than the Kingston DataTraveler HyperX (15 MBps).
Even if its poky speeds aren’t enough of a deterrent, business users may want to steer clear because Mini Attaché lacks the backup and encryption software available on the SanDisk Cruzer Contour, and it’s covered by a skimpy one-year warranty.
Verdict
Despite the affordable $24.99 price, the PNY Mini Attaché isn’t a device that we can recommend over other USB drives because it lacks the aesthetics, features, and all-around performance that its rivals possess. Still, it offers a solid 8GB of storage on the cheap, which can be quite attractive if turbo-charged read and writes aren’t paramount.
