PKparis K1

The PKParis K1 is easily the smallest USB flash drive we’ve ever seen. Barely bigger than a USB plug, it’s closer in size to Bluetooth and wireless mouse dongles than it is to other USB flash drives. To help prevent you from losing it, a small lanyard is included, which is threaded through a small hole in its sturdy metal casing so that you can tether the K1 to a key ring.

The PK Paris K1’s small size makes it tricky to unplug from a USB socket unless you have long fingernails, but PKParis advertises this as an advantage. The company pushes the K1 as an easy way of adding much needed storage space to Ultrabooks and other ultra-portable laptops that have a low capacity and a hard or impossible-to-upgrade SSD. The idea is that you plug in the PKParis K1 and never remove it, or only do so occasionally.

However, the K1’s performance in our file transfer tests show that it’s not really fast enough to be a substitute for a solid-state drive or hard disk. Large files were written at 12.6MB/s and read at 41.2MB/s. Small files were written at 4.6MB/s and read at 19.4MB/s. Read speeds were much faster than write speeds, but even here the K1 fell far behind other, admittedly larger USB flash drives.

The 32GB K1 is fairly priced for a flash drive, and is £1.16 per gigabyte. Its design will certainly attract some, but be warned that it’s more suited to backup and archiving than data you’ll want to access every day.