Active Media Products Penguin BLU Pen Drive

Introduction

Active Media Products sent us a surprise with the Executive I 2-in-1 Carbon Fiber Pen we took a look at last month. I have to admit I am not up to date on Linux or the many builds. The last time I sat down and tried to do anything with the operating system was a few nights before throwing my last LAN party where Linux was run on a few of the servers.

The Active Media Products Penguin BLU is quite an odd creature. On the surface it looks like a cute little USB drive that a fifth grader would be carrying around. Once installed the drive springs to life like an action movie. You can use the drive either as a standard run of the mill thumb drive or set your BIOS to boot from a USB device and be looking at a Linux desktop in under a minute.

Let's have a look at the specifications.

Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The Active Media Products Penguin BLU is a USB 2.0 thumb drive that is enclosed in soft, toxic free rubber that gives it the appearance of a penguin. These are available in 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16GB capacities. Prices range from 8 to 42 USD and they are all available from Amazon.com.

Active Media Products donates 5% of the retail price of each sale to the World Wildlife Fund. Active Media also sells a Panda and Polar Bear USB drive with the same contribution.

The Packaging

The packaging is pretty simple. Our USB Penguin arrived in a plastic box with a sticker sealing the two sides.



Part of the sticker shows the AMProducts contributions to the WWF.



The specifications are listed on the back side of the plastic box.

The Active Media Products BLU

Admit it, you know you want one now. The truth is I had to steal it back from my wife just to get the review finished.



The rubber on the penguin is soft. Here we see the top cover removed exposing the USB drive.



On the tail, back side of the drive a key ring hole is cut through so you can easily add the penguin to your key chain.

Test System Setup and ATTO Benchmark

Test System

Motherboard: ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer (Supplied by ASUS)
Processors: Intel 975 EE (Supplied by AVADirect)
Memory: Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz Triple Channel Kit
Graphics Card: Leadtek Quadro FX1700 (Supplied by Leadtek)
Enclosure: Lian Li V2000
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE2 (Supplied by Noctua)
SAS Controller: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i (Supplied by LSI)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate X64


We tested the Active Media Products Penguin BLU with TweakTown's new Storage Product Workstation. You can read more about the system and how drives are tested in this article.


ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.



Just like the Executive I Carbon Fiber Pen, the flash drive isn't very fast for transferring data. I was surprised, though, because using the drive to boot Linux off of seemed pretty smooth.

Final Thoughts

The Active Media Products Penguin BLU is an odd bird to say the least. It is not very often we see thumb drives dressed up like animals or bootable with a pre-installed operating system. AMP thought outside of the box and came up with something really unique.

When it comes to price the range is easily within reach with the highest tier drive coming in at 50 USD. Active Media Products is also looking to do some good for the environment by donating 5% of the retail sales value of each drive to the WWF.