Sandisk are probably one of the most well known companies manufacturing memory cards and USB flashdrives - in fact they have such a good reputation that some people won't use anything but them (this though is a somewhat blinkered view as there are many other equally good brands and many people buy sandisk for quality, but unwittingly buy a fake from the internet which is very likely to break. Unfortunately a side effect of Sandisk's 'fame' is that they are highly copied). I'm not especially loyal to sandisk as a brand (have another brand USB stick and most of my memory cards are brands other than sandisk) so I didn't set out to buy this particular model - my other USB is now permanently attached to my car stereo so I needed another one suitable for transporting photos for my photography business to show to various people and for printing.

This USB is incredibly small and lightweight, made of plastic and simply designed. What is not particularly obvious from the photo accompanying this review is that it has a slide button on the side, this is used to retract the USB connection inside the unit to help prevent damage when not in use - it also of course means you are at no risk of losing the lid . As there is no cover over this it would still be possible to get dirt in the top, so don't put it in the bottom of a grubby handbag!

At 8GB this has a decent sized memory - it's more than adequate for a huge number of data files (think word and excel documents), music files or potentially hundreds of images (depending on if you're storing jpeg, tiff, RAW etc.) This makes it perfect for trasfering copies of things between devices, handing things to clients and for long term back up purposes.

You don't need to download or install any special software for this - it's simply plug in and use. I've attached it to numerous devices (two types of industrial printers, windows xp/vista/7) and never had a problem with any of them. When attached to a computer or device the sliding part will also pulsate red, so that you know it's been detected. I simply drag and drop the information I want to copy into the open folder (when plugged into a windows it usually asks what you would like to do and I 'open containing folder') and that's it. This all comes together to make it very simple to use.

I purchased mine from amazon (directly from amazon themselves, not a market trader to ensure it's not a fake) and it cost me £7.49. I feel this is excellent value for money as you can easily pay 2 or 3 times this amount on the highstreet for a similar USB. In 2007 I paid £35 for a 4GB USB so the costs have come down massively since then.

Overall I would thoroughly recommend this Sandisk cruzer - it represents excellent value for money in respects to storage capacity and reliability.