Sony's shrunk its Micro Vault line of portable USB storage devices. We take an early look in our Australian First Take.Portable USB drives are everywhere in the market, whether you're after a high end device with inbuilt security features or a cheap and cheerful pocket filler to carry the family happy snaps around in. Sony's brand for its portable storage USB devices is the Micro Vault, and it's announced today the availability of two new Micro Vault lines -- the Mini Micro Vault USB2.0 and the Elite Micro Vault USB2.0. Depending on capacity, you can pick up a Mini Micro Vault USB2.0 for AU$109.95 to AU$219.95 (64MB-256MB), while the Elite models vary from AU$119.95 to AU$349.95 (128MB-512MB)
Upside: Both the Mini and Elite models offer increased throughput -- a claimed 12MB second while reading, up from 5.5MB/sec in earlier models. Writing speeds are up to 7MB/sec from 1MB/sec. The other big hook for these units is that they're smaller than previous models -- the new Mini is both smaller than its existing Mini line and some 4 grams lighter, while the Elite is 7 grams lighter than the larger existing Micro Vaults. Like Iomega and its range of Mini USB drives, Sony complements the Micro Vault with a range of bundled software that includes utitilities for file security and compression.
Downside: We're all for miniturisation, but we're not sure that 4 and 7 grams will make that much difference in anyone's pocket anyway. Smaller devices are, by their nature, easier to lose. Naturally, being Sony branded, the new Micro Vaults have something of a price premium over other USB storage devices, especially some of the non-branded varieties.
Outlook: It's good to see portable storage devices start to actually use the increased bandwidth of USB2.0 properly, but we'll wait on a full verdict once we've had time to fully evaluate both models. Check back soon for our Australian review.
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