AVB USB 2.0 Mobile Drive

The AVB USB 2.0 Mobile Drive has a capacity of 4 GB and is a very compact USB flash drive, measuring 69 mm x 17 mm x 9 mm. The design is very conventional, though, and is strongly reminiscent of the first such devices made for the mass market. Additionally, the casing feels very unstable. This is underlined by the fact that the USB Stick creaks when it is being handled, which doesn’t really inspire confidence. Like Kingston, AVB use a simple plastic cap to protect the USB connector. Unlike the other models, the AVB comes with a USB extension cable and a replacement cap in addition to the wristband.

Freshly unpacked, the USB stick only contains a small program weighing in at 196 KB which shows up simply as “Utility.exe” in the Windows Explorer. Beyond that, there is only an electronic user manual in PDF format. The first time we launched “Utility.exe”, the tool needed almost a minute to start. Only after we removed a CD we’d left in our optical drive from the system did the launch time for the “USB Disk Pro Security App” decrease to the much more reasonable level of two seconds. Thus, the first impressions we had of the USB stick also apply to the software – it doesn’t really inspire much confidence.

The “USB Disk Pro Security App” lets you create a password protected section on the USB drive, similar to that of the Kingston DataTraveler Secure. Compared to Kingston’s utility, AVB’s tool feels like something from the days of yore. The size of the protected area is also set using a sliding controller, after which the entire USB stick is formatted. However, the new protected area is only activated once you enter a password. If no password is set, you’ll thus obviously not be able to access it.

If you want to change the size of the private partition, you first have to remove the password protection in order to gain access to the slide controller again. This is a cumbersome process, since both the Explorer window and the “USB Disk Pro App” close once the settings are confirmed. This process is solved much more elegantly and user friendly in Kingston’s MyDataZone utility. Similarly to Kingston’s USB stick, the unprotected area is not displayed as a drive in the Windows Explorer while you have access to the password-secured section.