Sep 19

Sony Micro Tiny Vault

Posted in: Today's Chili

The Sony Micro Tiny Vault (1Gig) is a glimpse of where portable storage devices may be headed in the future. Being only slightly bigger than the SIM Card that’s in your mobile phone you would think that the storage size would be almost the same as that of your SIM Card, but you’d be wrong . They come in storage sizes ranging from 256Mb to 8Gig. And that isn’t even the best part, the best part is the fact that using the software provided with it, you can almost double the amount of storage space on the device.

Getting started

When you plug the Sony Micro Tiny Vault into your USB port, Windows goes about configuring it for use and once that is done you are able to install the Micro Vault Expander software which handles the compression and decompression of files while you are copying to/from the storage device.

Some test results

Obviously we couldn’t just go on what the press releases said, so we ran a few tests comparing the compression rates that the software achieves and here is what we found:

Text File (Alice in Wonderland):
Before: 148KB
After: 64KB

Generic Text File (Random article):
Before: 416KB
After: 172KB

PDF File (Containing images and text):
Before: 2.2Mb
After: 2.08Mb

DOC File (Containing images and text):
Before: 124KB
After: 64KB

Unfortunately already compressed files and images don’t benefit from the on-the-fly compression and use up the same space on the device as on your PC.

Conclusion

The Sony Micro Vault Tiny is a great idea and we are very excited to see where else this technology will be used in the near future – enabling us to store greater amounts of data on smaller devices. Overall, it gets 4 out of 5 from me, the only downside being no Mac/Linux support for the compression/decompression software.

Specifications

  • Interface: Hi-Speed USB (USB2.0
  • Port type: Type A USB port / USB1.1 port
  • External Dimensions: 14.5 x 2.7 x 32mm
  • Weight: Approximately 1.5g

Pricing and Availability

The Sony Micro Vault Tiny can be located using PriceCheck and retails for around R140.

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