I hate SanDisk Cruzer Thumb drives. Right now, I am running a temporary internet cafe for a conference of oceanographers and meteorologists, and so they need to upload their presentations. Therefore, they plug in their thumb drives, and I’ve seen the performance, reliability, and design of different models and brands. After plugging in literally 200 different thumb drives, I really really hate the SanDisk Cruzer drives.

The software is slow and buggy. When you plugin a SanDisk Cruzer drive, it loads in software it calls U3, to enable connection with the thumb drive. This software is slow, full of eye-candy, and offers nothing new. And the most grievous point: Why must a thumb drive require custom software? I can understand drivers, but custom software? Please. No one cares, and no one wants the extra software. I cannot imagine a single extra use that the software could provide, beyond encryption or security. Even that is better and faster done by external products, like TrueCrypt, or GPG.

When I say slow, I mean slow. Every other brand, even old old usb drives are done loading in Windows XP in less than 30 seconds on four year old machines. The U3 software means I have to wait well over two minutes, with the drive appearing and disappearing not once, not twice, but thrice. When cheap no-name brands of thumb drives can be done on an old machine in less than 30 seconds, your software is slow.

Just don’t buy SanDisk thumb drives. Maybe they might get the hint, and stop forcing the abysmal U3 software on their consumers.