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USB Drive Gripes

The USB Drive is a keychain storage device from JMTek

Out of Box Experience 

The USB Drive is an external USB storage device by JMTek. It belongs to a category sometimes referred to as Keychain storage devices, other times referred to as Flash storage devices. My unit is advertised as having a 32 megabyte capacity. The following describes my initial experience (late April 2002) with the device on a computer running Windows 2000 SP2. 

The printed user guide is four very small pages (a guidelet?) 

When new and completely empty, the properties of the disk drive show that is has 30.9 megabytes of free space. It is advertised as a 32 megabyte unit. It uses the FAT file system. Can this be changed to FAT32? The documentation says nothing about this. The cluster size is 2K (FYI). 
Update: I checked their online FAQ and it says that you can change to FAT32 but only if you are using Windows 2000. Why it would not work with Windows Me or Windows XP it does not say. Perhaps this was written prior to XP being released?  

I copied a group of files to the USB Drive in a single operation with Windows Explorer. The copy failed about halfway through. Windows said the destination drive was full. It was not. Drive properties show that 12.7 meg were used and 18.2 meg were free. The total size of the files being copied was about 22 meg. 

After deleting all the files just copied, I copied an entire directory to the USB Drive. The total size of the files in the directory was also about 22 megabytes. This copy ran fine. 

Update: A reader was nice enough to point out that this sort of error can happen due to limitations in the FAT file system. If you hit a limit associated with space in the root directory, the system will report a drive full when the real problem is not total space. It was suggested to not copy too many files to the root directory of a FAT drive but rather to use subdirectories. Back in the old days of 8.3 file names the limit was 512 files in the root directory of a FAT volume, but long file names take up more space so the limit will be variable and lower. (June 20, 2002).  

The device has a small switch on the side that according to the pictures next to it lock or unlock it. The printed user guide says nothing about this.  

A Check of the disk (chkdsk utility) without the options for Automatically fixing file system errors and scanning for bad sectors ran fine. However, with these options enabled, the Check disk failed. The error ("Windows was unable to complete the disk check") is shown here on the right. Is this normal for this type of drive? The documentation says nothing about it. To see which option was the problem, I later ran the check disk twice, once with each option the only one selected. Each time it ran fine. Finally, I re-ran check disk with both options turned on and it failed again with the same error. This error was not logged in any of the three system logs.  The user guide says the USB drive is compatible with USB 1.1. It says nothing about USB 1.0 or 2.0. How do you know if your USB port is 1.1 or 1.0? Beats me. Can you plug a USB 1.1 device into a USB 2.0 port and have it work? Again, the documentation does not say.  Update: Turns out there is no such thing as USB 1.0.  The underside of the unit is covered with a strip of clear plastic. Should this be removed? Again, the documentation says nothing about this.

After playing with the USB Drive for a while, I checked the Windows 2000 System Log. It showed two identical errors generated by the USB Drive. The event properties are shown here. The source was the Removable Storage Service. What this really means, I don't know.  Another instance of Windows 2000 SP2 on the same computer also had two of these errors. They occurred immediately after the USB Drive was inserted for the first time.  This error also occurred with subsequent usage of the USB Drive, however, there was only a single instance of the error when using the USB Drive on a computer where it had been used previously.  Another computer, also running Windows 2000 SP2 had this same error too. The only difference was that the message on the second computer referred to PhysicalDrive2 rather than the PhysicalDrive1 show here.  I emailed the vendor about this problem, but can't report what they said because I don't want to risk legal action. Their reply message included this: Note: This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed Suffice it to say, that after reading the reply from JMTek, this error message continues to be generated by Windows 2000 every time the USB Drive is used.  Update: This problem seems to be with Windows 2000 SP2. When the USB Drive was used with Windows XP on the same computer where it had this error under Windows 2000, there were no errors under XP. That is, on the same computer, this error is generated by Windows 2000 but not by XP. The problem therefore is not related to the USB port hardware or the USB Drive itself. (May 8, 2002)

The Included Mystery CD-ROM 

There is a CD-ROM disc in the box. Why? What is it? The USB Drive requires no drivers under most OSs and the driver that is needed for Windows 98 is supposed to be downloaded from the vendors web site. Their online FAQ specifically says no software needs to be installed. The printed user guide does not mention the CD at all. The CD itself says it is the USB Drive Installation CD-ROM. Installation of what is the question. 

I put the CD in the computer and got the message shown here at the right. Still a mystery, to me at least. 

Browsing the CD-ROM turned up very little. The only text file was called Release.txt. It says it is for the "3S USB Card Reader/Flash Disk Windows driver and Format Utility". Still a mystery. 

Update: Their online FAQ says the Windows 98SE driver is on the CD-ROM. However it also says the installation instructions are in the "manual". I could not find them. 

Using it With Windows 98 

August 20, 2002. Under Windows 200 (and I think XP too) there is an icon in the system tray that represents the USB Drive. Before removing the drive from the computer, you click on this icon to stop the device. Fine. However, under Windows 98 there is no equivalent icon and there is no documentation from JMTek. I asked technical support about this and they responded quickly. The lack of an icon in Windows 98 is normal. Prior to removing the USB Drive in Windows 98 the burden is on the user (me) to insure that no files on the drive are being used. 

July 26, 2002. I wanted to use the USB Drive on a Windows 98 laptop computer that does not have a CD-ROM. This is annoyingly hard to do because there is no documentation at all about the Windows 98 driver installation process. Fortunately all the files on the CD-ROM fit on a floppy disk. However, the question becomes what file to run or whether to run any file at all?  The autorun.inf file points to setup.exe, so I'll gamble that running it is the right thing to do. There is also an mFormat.exe program on the CD.

I ran setup.exe and that seems to have been the correct thing to do. It invoked a driver install program that seemed to run fine. Then I inserted the USB Drive and Windows 98 detected new hardware, but automatically installed whatever software it needed. I could see the files on the USB Drive. 

However, there is no system tray icon for the status of the drive. I have no idea if or when it is safe to remove the USB Drive while Windows 98 is running. Under Windows 2000, there is an icon from which you can "stop" the USB Drive before safely removing it. The Windows 98 computer has equivalent functionality, but only for the PCMCIA slots, not for the USB port. Maybe this is because the machine is not running Win98SE, but is instead running Windows 98 first edition? With no documentation, it's impossible to know. 

Next, I tried the USB Drive on another computer, this one running Windows 98SE. My experiences with Win98SE pretty much matched those with Win98, so I don't know why the vendor does not list Windows 98 as a supported OS for the USB Drive.

I installed the driver from the floppy disk under Win98SE, assuming again that this should be done before actually inserting the USB Drive in the USB port. After the required reboot, I inserted the USB Drive for the first time. Windows 98SE detected a new device and new hardware and automatically installed all the necessary software. Then nothing. The drive was detected and the machine had an H drive that it didn't used to have. However, there is no visual clue that this happened. As with Windows 98 first edition, there is no icon in the system tray indicating the presence of the USB Drive. This is a problem because there is no safe way to remove the device while the OS is running. 

The first thing I did to test the USB Drive was open a text file. Windows 98 said it was too large for Notepad and asked if I wanted to use WordPad instead. I said yes, WordPad opened with a blank document and the computer hung. It had to be turned off to reboot. This seemed to be a fluke however, after rebooting, I could access the drive without problem. I ran ScanDisk and Defrag on the drive without incident. 

FYI: The device shows up as a SCSI controller in Device Manager. The driver is from 3System, dated August 2, 2001 and is version 1.01.00.01. 

FYIs 

• The USB Drive comes with an extension cord for the USB port. Use it with computers where the USB port is not easily accessible. 
• I paid $40 for a 32 meg unit in April 2002 
• The vendor says it will work with Windows 98SE but it is not supported with Windows 98. 
• There is no security for the files on the USB Drive. If you lose it, anyone can read all the files it contains. JMTek has another product that they advertise as secure. It requires the installation of drivers on all supported OSs. 
• JMTek advises that you not format the USB Drive using Windows standard format. They say this will apply a different file allocation table than the one they use with the USB Drive 
• Tech support is available by email  or on this web page
• Dan Gillmor wrote about a competing product in Flash Disks to Go on August 5, 2002. He likes the devices, but warns (and I agree) not to carry them around unless the files are encrypted. The products made by Disk On Key support encryption. 
• CNet wrote about these devices on August 13, 2002.