Maxell Europe was kind enough to send us their Maxstix 1GB USB 2 flash drive for review. The Maxstix has a storage capacity of 1GB and has a USB 2 host interface for connection to a PC or MAC.

In this review we will test the performance of the Maxstix 1GB USB flash drive.

Maxell Europe Company Information

Specifications

What’s inside the box

Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself and what the drive came shipped with.

Our package was the retail version and contained the Maxstix and key chain.

We can see that Maxell Maxstix is supplied with a key chain and fob. We can also see a single LED (Blue) which flashes when the drive is active. The flash drive itself is compact and has a soft feel, non slip cover and, looks very cute indeed.

Included Software

The Maxell Maxstix includes a simple encryption and compression application (Secret Zip) which will run from the Maxstix itself, so there is no need to install any software.

Secret Zip and manual and a created test file

Secret Zip Options

We added 4 large bitmap images to our test file; we then added a password to protect the content.

In the screenshot above we can see the decryption dialog, after entering our password we were able to decrypt and unzip our images. There were no problems to report with the supplied encryption and compression software. The fact that the software will run directly from the Maxstix itself proved to be very handy indeed.

Now let’s head on to the next page were we can take a look at some benchmarks…