PQI Tiffany 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

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The name Tiffany has long been associated with elegance, grace and even luxury. I mean when you hear the name, what do you think of? For myself and I'm sure others as well its Tiffany and Co. and the exquisite beauty of their handmade jewellery, a status symbol of the wealthy and something that ultimately makes every woman want. So quite fittingly PQI has played off the name and brought the luxury and elegance into their newest flash drive, aptly named the PQI Tiffany flash drive.

The Tiffany USB 3.0 flash drive is available in 16GB and 32GB capacities. Marketing dictates that each of these drives are capable of 210MB/s read and 80MB/s write, while being compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and even Mac OS X.

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The packaging for the Tiffany reminds you of something you would get from a jewellery shop. PQI took it one step further adding a small bead bracelet to attach your drive.

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The Tiffany is a rather small flash drive, in fact it is the smallest we have tested here at TweakTown. PQI, choosing the name Tiffany, have made the drive rather elegant. The structure of the drive is configured so that the external shell is one piece of aluminium with a simple logo on the front.

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The back side of the drive shows the capacity.

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Being a USB 3.0 drive, the connection is colored blue. Now the next few photos are where I normally tear the drive apart and show the internals, but as this drive uses a solid aluminium structure, I didn't want to sacrifice the drive for pictures sake. If you must know I was able to use software to figure out that this drive uses the IS903 controller and Samsung DDR Toggle NAND in a dual-channel configuration.

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To give some sort of comparison we have stacked the PQI Tiffany up against the SanDisk Extreme, which is standard sized flash drive, and the Corsair Survivor Stealth, which is rather large thanks to its external casing.

One of the lesser known features of running Microsoft's new operating system Windows 8 is the native capability of USB Attached SCSI or UASP. To start my benchmarking procedure I secure erased the PQI Tiffany, as I do all drives I test.

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Opening up the disk properties for the Tiffany, we find that we have 29.2GB of usable space and the drive is formatted in the FAT32 file system from the factory.

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The Tiffany was able to exceed marketing specifications slightly in sequential testing with ATTO peaking at 224MB/s read and 84MB/s write.

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Running CDM produced similar results in sequential testing, but the Tiffany took a dive when it came to 512K write managing just 4MB/s.

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If we glance over our charts, which have started to become populated, we can see the Tiffany slides right in the middle of the pack when it comes to real-world transfers. The Tiffany matches performance with Corsair's latest drive, the Survivor Stealth.

The PQI Tiffany is a well-built elegant drive that would make a great companion drive for any ultra-book or MacBook user. In fact, as soon as my wife saw this drive laying on my desk, she snatched it up for use at work. That should tell you something right off the bat. PQI has manufactured and marketed the drive quite well, catching the eye of the shopper with the jewellery based packaging, a good move and I must give kudos to that.

As far as performance is concerned, the Tiffany isn't the fastest drive we have tested, then again, we were able to achieve just over the stated marketing speeds of 220MB/s read and 80MB/s write.

Pricing on the drive at this point is a bit iffy as I could only find it on eBay with several auctions listing it at $44.99. However, this being the price, it does lift the Tiffany above the $1 per GB, and with availability quite slim, I'm not sure you could get your hands on one even if you wanted to.

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