The Package



For the box, a grey and white affair is used with a see-through window so you can actually see the unit itself; no need for any pictures on the back this time.



While the unit is clearly visible from the front, a picture is placed on the back of the box with some demo pictures as well, this to show you the blade function of the drive. Also on the back are the specs of the flash drive.



Lastly, inside the box is a quick start user manual giving you details on the drive and the included ACE software.


The Drive



The drive itself is extremely compact, about the length of the index finger and very thin at that. The unit from the back has a red dangle handle that you use to remove the drive from the notebook as it’s designed to sit on its side rather than stick up towards the keyboard or out away from the notebook; this makes the drive very easy to use as you’re not getting poked in the hand when using the keyboard or bumping into it if you choose to use a mouse.



The drive has 180 degree rotation so you can use it on either side of the notebook, depending which way the USB ports face and how far they are offset towards the front or back of the casing. The capacity of the drive we were shipped has a whopping 4GB, which is almost enough to store a full single sided single layer DVD without compression, very impressive indeed. The drive also supports ReadyBoost under Vista. We enabled this and did some basic tests, we found no increase in performance. If there is any, it’s definitely quite minimal.



The ACE or Apacer Compression Engine software has 2 purposes. First off, it allows you to greatly compress files on the drive, this allowing you to store more than the 4GB on the drive.

We managed to fit 7GB in our tests. Once the files are stored within the ACE software you can’t access it by Explorer, you have to open the program to extract the files to use them. Another feature is the password protection; this gives you the option to put sensitive files within the ACE which then hides the files and password protects them, and in a very secure way at that.