Sandisk 8GB Cruzer Titanium USB 2.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ7-8192-A11, Retail Package)
by SanDisk
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Our Price: $114.75 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $74.95 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sandisk 8GB Cruzer Titanium USB 2.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ7-8192-A11, Retail Package)
Customer Review: Our hero's battle with certain doom
Summary: 5 Stars
Our hero, SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB, suddenly awoke to an unfamiliar rumbling. The surroundings were unforgiving at best; constantly shifting and turning about. SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB looked around. No longer enveloped in the soft confines of the slacks pocket which had been its home for the past three days, our hero found itself in a free fall, as the speed of the new landscape's shifting began to increase. Then, without warning, a soapy rain started to fall, flooding the area. As the watery onslaught continued, SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB knew its tough metallic outer layer found a danger it couldn't withstand. Our hero blacked out as liquid death filled his microchips: eating away at its delicate insides. SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB passed out...
Suddenly, intense heat jolted our hero awake. This was a different environment than before, and the high temperature presented a deadly new threat. Barely hanging on to dear life after the previous challenge, it appeared SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB would face certain doom. With the hot surroundings spinning even faster than before, our hero felt the top of its exterior begin to pull away from the bottom. In excruciating pain, SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB felt its body break apart, scattering its insides like candy from a piñata. Could this be it, our hero thought as its microchips drifted past, could this be the end?
"This has to work," our hero's sidekick shouted frantically. "It's gotta." SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB lay in disarray as its friend tried to piece his broken frame back together. "Hang in there, buddy. For old times' sake."
Doubt filled our hero's sidekick's mind as he took his newly put-back-together friend to the nearest computer. Even though he was certain of SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB's death, he just had to find out. He just had to make sure. He owed him that - after all, it was his fault his friend suffered such a terrible fate.
No sooner had the sidekick plugged our hero into the computer than SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB started flashing its lights. Its menu popped up on the screen, recalling the most recent contents it was carrying. Its sidekick looked on in disbelief, knowing what the flashing lights and menu screen display were telling him: it's gonna take more than that to kill SANDISK CRUZER TITANIUM 8GB. Much more.
Customer Review: High Quality
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this drive to store important backups and keep them with me at all times on a keyring. I'd had a Transcend and Dane Elec before. The Transcend was okay, but I wanted a metal case this time, with a more robust keyring attachment. The Dane Elec had an incredibly flimsy keyring attachment that broke the first day on my keyring, and a cap that was loose enough to fall off and get lost on the second day.
The SanDisk Titanium solves all those issues. There is no question this drive's build quality is excellent. Speed also seems excellent. Aesthetically, it is good, but not great: the titanium has a mediocre tactile quality. If I was designing the product, I'd consider applying a coating to improve the feel.
My biggest gripe is that the metal case makes a loud "clacking" sound as it bumps other things on my keyring: swiss army knife, car key, etc. I solved the problem by wrapping the drive and some of the other items with several layers of thin strips of electrical tape, but I don't like to think about the gummy mess I will have if it sits in the sun awhile on a hot day. In addition to the tactility mentioned above, a good coating could also improve this aspect of the drive. Sonically, I might be happier if I'd gotten the regular Micro Cruzer, which has a plastic case. I also imagine a kind of flash drive condom, that would mute the noise, but I have not found one yet. Leave a comment if you know of something: the flash drive cases on sale here at Amazon and at WalMart are far too bulky for a keyring.
I immediately removed SanDisk's U3 software from the drive using a download from SanDisk's web site running under Parallels on my Mac, and formatted the drive as Mac OS (Extended) using Apple Disk Utility. I have a couple of encrypted disk images on the drive for source code and other sensitive files. Free software named Mathusalem, which offers both encryption and compression, is used to perform some of the backups to the drive.
For my next boutique flash drive, I may look at Transcend again, but for now, the Titanium Cruzer gives me a reliable, sturdy drive I am proud to carry. It definitely isn't junk, and ought to satisfy you if you want eight gigs of storage you can really trust.
Customer Review: This is a great stick, and an even better price!
Summary: 5 Stars
The first thing I did when I received this drive is download the Sandisk U3 Uninstaller from the Sandisk website. I don't need the U3 software, and having it my system tray (along with the extra read-only disk image mounted) just drives me crazy. I can definitely see benefits to having it, but since I don't use it, I got rid of it to clear up space.
After a clean FAT32 format, I popped this into my development box. At work, we have dozens of machines that need to have the exact same configuration for development and testing purposes. So I flipped the bit to make this drive bootable, copied the series of Red Hat Enterprise CD images to it, copied all of the apps and tools required by my team, and wrote a bash script to install all of these items one at a time.
Since it's bootable now, I can just plug it in and restart the box. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux installer will come on, wipe the hard drive and install a clean copy of the operating system without having to swap CD's. Then after a reboot I can put it in again and run the bash script, installing all of the necessary software. After appending some lines to fstab, bashrc, and hosts files, everything is as it should be.
Since we need to do this frequently, the drive gets a lot of use and is manhandled constantly. It holds up really well. The casing is metal, and shows no signs of flex. It has a nice weight to it, as well. The USB connection slides out from inside the case and locks into place -- far better than the "old style" port with plastic cap to cover it.
The speed is good, too -- it performs significantly faster than installing from CD's. It's faster because of its data transfer speed, as well as the fact that we don't have to swap out the 5 OS installer CD's and the 9 other software installer CD's that we need (not to mention the several applications normally downloaded from our server at a fraction of the transfer rate).
This is a great buy. I can't think of anything bad to say about it!
Customer Review: Great Titanium 8GB; 'delete U3 software' available
Summary: 5 Stars
I received my Cruzer 8 GB Titanium late yesterday afternoon and immediately went to work. Since I use a couple of 8 GB Cruzer Micros, there was no problem deciding to "postpone" installation of a bit questionable U3 program that SanDisk offers. My new Cruzer Titanium worked out-of-the box. I'll have to double check the specs but it seems to me that when comparing, Titanium versus SunDisk Micro, Titanium transfer rate is faster; although in a real world gaining some 60 seconds during a four/five minute long 'working' session makes no difference. My video and raw digital pictures (sizes 2-6 MB each) loaded fast. In 15 minutes time, I was able to watch a MPEG movie file - that I transferred to this new Titanium Cruzer drive - on my laptop monitor! I can take it tomorrow to my friend's house, as promised. Titanium's case is stronger, yes. What is strange, please explain, that I got this 8 GB Titanium via limited special sale offer from SanDisk. However, I'm ordering two more from Amazon today, not from the SanDisk (a special offer, remember?) They are $10 less each. The last-night-received Titanium 8GB was made in China. (Surprise, surprise?) Of course, I do not suspect that SanDisk is offering counterfeit Chinese SanDisk drives although there might be plenty of them on the market, as somebody suggested here. I do not suspect this from the Amazon.com and its sellers either. In any case, bravo SanDisk!
BTW: SanDisk offers Uninstall U3 software. It is sitting on their Web page. SanDisk says it does not apply only to Cruzer Titanium Plus. I don't know if it works.
http://www.sandisk.com/driverdownload/download.asp?driverId=2
Customer Review: Sandisk 8GB Cruzer Titanium USB 2.0 Flash Drive
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great product. My wife has the older 1GB titanium and I really liked the durable metal case and push out connection. Most other thumb drives have a cover which I know would be lost in a week leaving it unprotected. You have to hold the slider hard with your thumb when you push it in the usb slot or it will just slide back and not make a full connection. It's not a big deal though once I realized that.
This new 8GB model is great on space, and is half the size of the original so it's perfect if you want to use it with a lanyard around your neck. Unfortunatly sandisk no longer supplies a lanyard with these new models, but they are very nice and if you call their support line you can get them to send you one for free. Call and ask for an accessory replacement lanyard.
I did have a bit of trouble using it on my work computer, but after reading up on this I found like some others it was because of other dvd viewing/burning programs causing it to lock up. There is some sort of glitch with this making the PC think the sandisk is a CD drive and won't let you access it, only freeze up. If you have this problem just make sure you don't have any dvd software running in the background, or taskbar. It works fine on both my home PC's with winXP. I transfered some large files to it and it seems to be pretty quick, good enough for me anyway. I don't expect it to be lightning fast, just get the job done.
I spent a while researching different thumb drives before deciding on this one, and I am happy with my choice.