Gemalto YuuWaa 4 GB

The YuuWaa from Gemalto, a smart card manufacturer, is a rather novel storage solution: buy this USB key, and you'll also get access to online storage on the company's servers.  It comes in three physical sizes, 2 GB, 4 GB and 16 GB with between 8 GB and 16 GB available online.

Disappointing speeds

Gemalto YuuWaa 4 GB Transcend JetFlash 160 4 GB

The manufacturer is some way behind the competition with its transfer speeds, and that puts this key is at the bottom of our table for write speeds.  It only managed an average of 4.4 MB/s, unlike the very best models which climb above 12 MB/s.  It makes up for some of this with higher read speeds of 19.2 MB/s on average, but that's not enough to match the power of the 32 GB Maxell SSD, which reachers 26.9 MB/s in the same conditions.

Software


Because the performance of the online storage component varies depending on your own internet connection, we haven't included the data transfer rates as part of our analysis.  To give you an idea though, when we were uploading and downloading a 650 MB file, we had speeds of 70 KB/s and 162.5 KB/s respectively.

The interface is divided into three columns: one for the computer, one for the online storage space and one for the USB key.  To make it easier to find your way around, Gemalto has simplified the software as much as possible, but that leads to some nasty surprises.  You can't sort files by date, type or size for instance.  Likewise, it's very easy--too easy, in fact--to delete important files from your computer, the key or the online storage with just a single click, and only the last of these has a trash can.  So if you delete the wrong file on the USB key or on your computer, your files are gone for good unless you can get them back using specialist data recovery software.

A file sharing system is also available, but only for individual files not entire folders.  It's incredibly simple: all you need to do is add your contacts and then send them an e-mail with a link to download the file you  want to send them.