A Review of the 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer Flash Drive

I've been a fan of the SanDisk Cruzer line of flash drives for several years now. My first flash drive was a 512 MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro. My second was a 2 GB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium, which I reviewed here. Now I am reviewing my third flash drive, the updated 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer.

There is nothing wrong with my older SanDisk flash drives. They both still work perfectly. However, I wanted a flash drive with more room so that I could carry movies on my person or when traveling. The 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer seemed to fit the bill for this task. The packaging even says "Ideal for Video."

The packaging of the 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer is actually something I really like about the product. It is made out of simple cardboard and relatively little plastic. The packaging is not much bigger than it needs to be, so it's fairly green. This is in stark contrast to many new items that have unnecessarily large, plastic packaging. Moving on...

One thing I noticed before I even opened the packaging was that no lanyard was included with SanDisk Cruzer. This wasn't a huge deal, as I could take the lanyard off of one of my older flash drives, but I still would have preferred for a new lanyard to be packaged with the SanDisk Cruzer.

After removing the 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer from its packaging, I was immediately impressed by the weight of the flash drive. It is much lighter than my Cruzer Titanium, and if my estimations are correct, the Cruzer weighs about as much as a single quarter does. Considering that it has a capacity of 16 gigabytes, this is extremely impressive, at least to me. It seems as if SanDisk is using a less-dense plastic now than on earlier models in order to reduce the weight of the Cruzer. The new SanDisk Cruzer feels less durable than the Cruzer Micro, but I'm not about to test that for the purposes of this review. If you are careful with your flash drive, you'll hopefully never have to find out either.

The new casing for the SanDisk Cruzer has grown on me considerably. It is more rectangular than the Cruzer Micro, and the tab used for pushing out the USB connector is larger and easier to manipulate. For people that don't have nails or much hand strength, this is a very good design improvement. The flash drive retains the orange light when it is plugged in, which emanates from the white push-out tab. I like this because it acts as a sort of reminder to unplug the flash drive when leaving a friend's house or a computer lab. I use a Mac, so the U3 accessories don't matter to me. I uninstalled them right away. This frees up a little extra space on the flash drive, and better application suites can be found elsewhere. I describe some of the things that can be done with a larger flash drive here.

All in all, I really like the 16 GB SanDisk Cruzer. It has tons of space, is lightweight, and is as easy to use as previous SanDisk products. For a price tag of less than $30 on Amazon, it's really hard to beat this deal.

Do you have any experience with SanDisk products? What do you think? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the form of a comment. Thank you for reading!