ATP EarthDrive: A USB Flash Drive Made Of Corn

Performance:

We tested out the ATP ToughDrive Camo 8GB and ATP EarthDrive 8GB on a Lenovo ThinkPad T61. This notebook is equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 2GB of DDR2 memory, 120GB FUJITSU MHY2120BH SATA HDD, and NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M 512MB. On the software side was Ubuntu 8.10 with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, NVIDIA 180.22 driver, and GCC 4.3.2. We compared the performance of these two flash drives to that of an 8GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT. All three drives were formatted to a FAT32 file-system.

For some simple flash drive testing we used the Phoronix Test Suite with the timed disk read test using hdparm.

Conclusion:

The read performance of the ATP EarthDrive and ToughDrive were about the same at 27MB/s, which is ahead of where the Corsair Flash Voyager GT had performed. With the ToughDrive, while it performed faster than the Flash Voyager GT, the USB cap on this drive being relatively loose does concern us and would make us choose the Flash Voyager series over that due to the tighter cap. Besides that concern, we are pleased with waterproof ATP ToughDrive Camo 8GB flash drive.

The ATP EarthDrive is unique with it likely being the first biodegradable flash drive on the market with most of it being made of Polylactic Acid. For those interested in the ATP EarthDrive for its environmental good, ATP also pledges to donate a portion of the profits generated from the sales of EarthDrive to the American Forests' National Tree planting projects. The ATP EarthDrive 8GB model does cost about $60 USD, which is significantly more than some of the other 8GB USB 2.0 flash drives on the market.