Everyone seems to be going green, and finally, in the last couple years the electronics industry is catching up and following everyone else. These days people specifically buy things that are labeled ‘green’, and a good company or marketer knows that, so why not take advantage of it and not only make a bit more money but do something good for the environment?

Today for review I’ve got the ATP EarthDrive, it’s probably the first fully recyclable USB drive on the market today, it’s very small, waterproof, fairly fast and ATP is even donating a portion of each sale to help plant trees.

So getting one of these drives, not only gets you a nice fast, recyclable USB drive, but you can feel good about helping out as well.

The ATP Earth drive comes in a not very green style of package, the dreaded plastic clamshell, though ATP has introduced biodegradable paper packaging in other parts of the world.

The only thing included with the Earth drive is a nylon lanyard style keychain.

The USB connection slides out of the housing and locks into place.

Specifications:

EarthDrive

The ATP EarthDrive is the world’s first bio-recyclable USB drive that is also built using revolutionary new bio-recycled materials. ATP is also partnering with American Forests, a world leader in planting trees for environmental restoration. With each EarthDrive sold, ATP will donate a portion of the profits to help plant trees throughout the United States as well as on a global basis.

With years of product development and extensive research, the EarthDrive is designed and built using the maximum amount of recycled materials, resulting in a fully recyclable product. The EarthDrive is not only the most environmentally friendly storage device on the market today, but a dependable storage product as well.

The ATP EarthDrive is the world’s first recyclable USB Drive, appropriately named the EarthDrive. With years of product development and extensive research, the EarthDrive’s housing is designed and built using the maximum amount of biodegradable materials (PLA), resulting in a fully recyclable product. PLA (Polylactic acid) is a biodegradable polyester derived from renewable resources, such as corn.

Specs:
ATP Part Number: AF8GUFE1BK
Capacities: 8GB
Connectivity: High Speed USB1.1 / 2.0 compliant
Indicator: LED Light Indicator
Preloaded Software: Drive Partitioning, Password Protection
Data Retention: 10 years
Length: 35.7mm +/- 0.20mm
Width: 23.3mm +/- 0.10mm
Thickness: 10.31mm +/- 0.20mm

ATP is also launching "Project: EarthDrive", a program initiated in conjunction with a partnership with American Forests, a world leader in planting trees for environmental restoration. With each EarthDrive sold, ATP will donate a portion of the profits to help plant trees in order to contribute to the efforts of offsetting our carbon footprint and restoring the environment.  American Forests’ Global Releaf projects allow for tree planting throughout the United States as well as on a global basis. With the start of this important program, ATP has already helped plant thousands of trees on a National and International basis. American Forests already has more than 25 million trees planted through more than 500 projects nationwide so far.

* Designed with Recycled Material
The EarthDrive’s unique housing was designed to be recyclable.

* American Forests Partnership
In partnership with the American Forests, a portion of all EarthDrive product sales will go towards the planting of trees.

* Waterproof for all Conditions
In addition to being one of the most durable USB drives in the world, the EarthDrive is also one of the most versatile. Built with ATP’s SIP technology, all vital flash components are completely encapsulated allowing for shock proof, waterproof, and dust proof durability.

* Security Protection
The EarthDrive’s built in security software allows for password protection of private data.

Here’s a comparison shot of the Earth Drive and a few others, you can see it’s one of the smaller USB drives out there today.

It does has a blue LED in it to indicate power and activity, though I would have thought a green LED would have been more appropriate for this drive given it’s ‘green’ nature.

When you first put the Earth drive in you’re greeted with folder, a PDF file and a trial version of Carry it Easy.

Carry it Easy is actually a fairly useful program to help you take all of your stuff with you, to bad it’s just a trial version it it though.

The other program included is a generic partition manager and security program, it allows you to create a public and a password protected secure partition on the Earth Drive.

So you know what it does and what comes with it, now let’s check out the performance of the ATP EarthDrive.

First up we’ve got SiSoft Sandra 2009 Removable Storage Benchmark:

A bit slower than the fastest drives but still not too bad overall.

Here’s a  look at the 256mb Files test:

Read performance is very good, on par with the other drives, but it’s the write performance that is what lowered the overall score.

Next up we’ve got Diskbench, this one tells us in real time how long it takes to do things like Copy To, Copy From and Read From a device. A 350Mb .AVI video file was used for the testing. Obviously the lower the time the better performance.

Again here we see it’s the write speed that isn’t the greatest on the EarthDrive, 40 seconds to transfer the file, or write it to the USB drive. Still 40 seconds isn’t bad, I’m not in that much of a hurry…

here’s a graph showing the actual speeds of the above transfers, here’s it’s the higher the better of course:

As we can see the EarthDrive only achieved a little over 8 MB/s transfer rate. As we can also see Read and Copy From transfer rates are very good though, so once you get your stuff on there you can get it off fast!

Overall though it’s not bad times, unless you’re in like a super hurry to get your files transferred over.. meh, no big deal.

Conclusion:
The ATP EarthDrive is the first USB drive to be green, and not in color of course, in theme, it’s made of biodegradable materials to make sure it can be recycled when it’s life cycle is complete. It’s also fairly fast, well made, waterproof and of course nice and small so you can easily take it with you wherever you go.

Sure it’s not the fastest out there when it comes to write speeds, but I think it’s fine for most people. Unless you’re like some super spy that needs to transfer files immediately, this drive is more than fast enough for most people.

Pros:
Quick transfers from the drive
Very small and portable
Waterproof
Well made
Biodegradable / recyclable

Cons:
Slow write speeds

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance