Verbatim Store’n’Go Clip-it 4GB

If what’s been missing from your life is a USB key you could attach to your clothing rather than your keyring, the Verbatim Clip-it may be just the ticket. It’s a tiny 36mm x 12mm USB key, just 4.5mm thick, designed to function as a paperclip-and-USB-key combination. We conducted a range of highly scientific tests to discover just how well it worked. For holding together up to five pages, the Clip-it is great, but adding a sixth page meant that the gadget’s grippy plastic also wrinkled the paper. Attached to thicker items, the Clip-it starts to bend alarmingly. But it’s designed to stick around. Attached to even a single page, we had to give three full-strength shakes (think towel-flicking) to dislodge the Clip-it. Your best bet for pristine copies is to attach a Clip-it to the front page of your all-important papers.

Performance-wise, the Clip-it is firmly middle of the range for a USB 2.0 drive – for a single 100MB large file we clocked write speeds of 5.8MBytes/s and read speeds of 12.5MBytes/s. When we tried 3000 small files totalling 100MB, we achieved a slower 0.6MBytes/s write and 5.9MBytes/s read speed. There are few additional features - you can download password protection software from Verbatim, but there’s no keyring loop or backup software.

Still, with a two-year warranty and a price of $16 for the multi-colour 2GB version or $20 for the 4GB version (sadly only available in black or white), this is a useful addition to any student toolkit.