May 27

Boycott SanDisk Cruzer drives

Category: design,users

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.

6 comments

6 Comments so far

  1. airfeed May 29th, 2008 1:21 am

    You can get rid of the U3 software. You just reformat the usb drive. While I agree they should stop preloading it onto their flashdrives, I don’t think its necessary to boycott them. I have a 4GB Cruzer Micro and I have been very happy with it since I got rid of U3.

  2. zeroth May 29th, 2008 3:34 am

    Yeah, but none of the conference attendees had done so. So it was immensely annoying.

  3. foo May 31st, 2008 6:08 am

    You do know that you can just turn off autorun in Windows, using TweakUI? That feature’s a security risk anyway, so it shouldn’t be on in the first place. Turning it off is one of the first things I do on a new Windows install. As for the Cruzer Micro’s USB partition, it has plenty of great uses – http://wiki.hak5.org/wiki/USB_Switchblade

  4. Aziz June 23rd, 2008 9:10 am

    I’ve got one, and I immediately removed U3 (I don’t think formatting gets rid of it so easily – you have to download a tool from there site). I replaced it with http://www.portableapps.com. My Cruzer Micro has been pretty reliable, actually.

  5. Aziz June 23rd, 2008 9:13 am

    Oh, in addition, I agree that U3 is utterly and completely stupid =/ I simply bought my SanDisk stick because it was the cheapest reliable brand.

  6. Brent July 30th, 2008 1:46 pm

    U3 _is_ a virus because ScanDisk allows it to INSTALL without first ASKING the user if they want it. Software that modifies your system without your permission is a virus. You plug in the new flash drive, and it auto-installs. No where on the product or packaging was any mention of auto-installing propritary software that would add a virtual cd drive letter and impact system performance, which it did. U3 software will conflict with other popular software such as all varieties of CD/DVD burning software. This is somewhat like the Sony DRM Rootkit which got that company into a great deal of hot water. I have been looking for a group that is interested in seeking civil litigation against Sandisk. Companies that pull this sort of stunt do need to be held accountable.