Rating: 
Summary: Great size, nice design, works well too!
Review: Yet another entry into the increasingly crowded flash drive market, Sandisk's Cruzer Micro sets itself apart with a great form factor and nice design. It's almost half the size of my Cruzer Mini, which was run over by a car and replaced by this. Instead of a green LED, you get a nicer-looking blue one. The body is plastic like on the mini, and feels really solid.Write speeds are decent on a USB 2 machine, and livable on a USB 1.1 machine due to the slow interface. You won't get anywhere near the theoretical 480 megabits per second (60 megabytes per second) USB 2 peak data rate due to limitations of the memory controller and memory chips themselves. In testing, I get a little over 3 megabytes/second of read/write speed on a USB 2 equipped computer, and about 600-700 kilobytes/second on a USB 1.1 machine. The Cruzer Micro comes with about 249MB free out of the box, which is a relief coming from Memory Sticks with 70+ MB missing due to formatting and copy-protection space. You can also use the Cruzer Micro as the memory portion of an mp3 player that Sandisk is releasing, but seeing as it isn't available anywhere yet, the jury is still out on this added feature. Why did I dock it one star? In use on USB 2 machines, the Cruzer Micro heats up quite a bit with extended read/writes with large files. This was noticed on both a Sony VAIO laptop and a Dell Dimension Desktop. On USB 1.1 machines the Cruzer did not heat up. It wasn't quite hot, more uncomfortably warm. I always worry since heat is the enemy of many electronics, and other flash drives I've used don't heat up to quite this degree. I did an exchange, and the replacement did the same thing. My Cruzer Mini also did this, so I'm not sure what to make of it. Aside from the small heat issue, it's a tiny flash drive that looks great and works well. With prices dropping all the time on flash drives, the convienence of transporting your files around is now very affordable. Highly recommended.
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