With so much of our lives now digital it is important to be able to preserve our pictures and documents etc. in the event of a computer crash. I used to be really bad at backing up until I lost a lot of sentimental photographs once and now I try and make sure I save everything on a regular basis.
Because of this unfortunate loss I now have several memory cards and flash drives floating about my house and to be honest it is like the good old days when I would have camera films lying around and not know what was on them only now it is easy to just plug a memory card or flash drive into the laptop and check and see what's on them.

The majority of my cards and flash drives are nearly all full up and although I have a separate media centre I am a bit OCD in that I don't quite trust that to not also break on me so when I was buying some DVD's before Christmas on play.com I decided to add this 8GB flash drive to my basket too. The main reason I chose it was because of the price which was fantastically competitive £4.99 which also included free delivery. As it was branded play.com and I've bought literally tons of things from them before I was confident that it would be a decent product because I couldn't imagine them putting their name to a sub-standard product.

When the flash drive arrived it was just as I was expecting and was nice and neat. In our quest to make everything smaller the drive would be easy to lose if you're not careful but at least at only a few cm long it is easy to store away without taking up any sort of room.
It is made from a transparent blue plastic and I quite like the look of it and don't think it looks particularly cheap and nasty. It is very similar in design to the majority of other flash drives on the market but I do think that the transparency of the plastic adds a little to its looks.

To protect the USB part it is covered by a removable cap which goes on and off easily but feels quite secure when actually clicked into place. So far I have had no trouble going to get the flash drive and finding that the cap has come off and went missing. When the flash drive is in use the cap clicks onto the other side of the flash drive so that you don't need to lay it down and increase its chances of getting lost.
The USB port slides into the USB on my laptop with ease and is neither too loose or difficult and tight to remove again like I have with some other flash drives that I've bought previously.

As for transfer speeds the flash drive supports reading speeds of up to 15mb's and writing speeds of up to 6mb's. Now I don't really understand what this means exactly but in the reality of daily use I find the flash drive to be quite zippy at both transferring files onto it and off again. It is also incredibly easy to use and is a true plug and play product with no need to download any files to be able to use it and it is compatible with both PC's and Mac's.

I chose the 8GB one because of the excellent price but it also comes in a 4GB and 16GB version which also offer excellent value for money. The 8GB is more than adequate for what I wanted it for and it can store a good few hundred pictures on it. Because I have been so impressed with it I am planning on buying the larger version too as my photo collection is rapidly expanding by the day.

The one slight niggle that I have with it is that because of the play.com branding there is nowhere to write on what exactly what files the flash drive contains. This is easily remedied by putting on a small sticker but I would have liked there to have been somewhere on it for me to write. Also because of the plastic construction it isn't going to withstand any sort of hard trauma to it. It will be fine falling to the floor etc. but I imagine it would easy be crush if you stood on it for example.

For the money I think this flash drive is a complete bargain. It is very similar to a lot of others on the market but is cheaper and just as good if not better to use than a lot of them. I will definitely be buying myself another one and would highly recommend it to people looking for a cheap but decent way of backing up their digital files.