SanDisk Freedom with FlashCP
-or-
It stands for 'Communist Policy'
Summary: avoid at all costs.
My dad needed a flash drive. In this modern day and age, flash drives are on sale every week. You don't have to look for a bargain, you can assume that there will be one at the store. We went to buy the flash drive of the week at Staples.
We picked the sturdiest/cheapest drive they had. It was called the 'Freedom', a 256 MB drive manufactured by SanDisk, and meant for students. The packaging also said "Windows XP/2000 required".
I didn't realize it at the time, but I should have ran at the sight of a "student version". It had some special protected partition (FlashCP), and I assumed this feature established the Windows requirement. The normal flash partition should work fine, right?
Wrong. I scoured SanDisk's website for a Windows 98 driver. None to be found. We had a few other SanDisk products, and none of their drivers worked. While driver hunting, I learned the horrible truth about the FlashCP.
'CP' means copy-protection. The extra partition is a 'virtual backpack' for storing textbooks and material that can be purchased, though the texts will expire after a year or so. Staples is the sole distributer. Finally, there is a special chip on each FlashCP. This chip holds a unique serial number for teachers to identify their students. The chip also actively enforces the Windows requirement. The drive can not be mounted on Linux or Macintosh systems. (Dmesg gives a bunch of errors about not finding the partition table.)
Its a horrible product embodying an evil concept, wrapped in an attractive plastic case. I wouldn't even consider cracking the case open to put in a real flash drive. That would be about as social responsible as defusing a land mine to use as a Frisbee. Kids would get the wrong idea.
Linkback: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~kmk592/rants/sandisk-freedom/ Printer friendly links: none History: 2005/12/31 uploaded