Features & Specifications
The ATP EarthDrive is available in capacities of 1GB to 8GB and is USB 2.0 compliant as well as backwards compliant with USB 1.1. The drive has a LED that flashes to indicate drive activity and comes preloaded with drive partitioning and password protection software. The drive is tiny, measuring 35.7mm x 23.3 mm x 10.31mm.

The ATP EarthDrive is constructed from biodegradable PLA (polylactic acid), a polyester derived from renewable resources like corn. The drive is also waterproof, shock proof, and dust proof. Most of the internal components of the drive are encapsulated to add durability.

Design & Performance
One of the ways the ATP EarthDrive is able to be packaged into such small dimensions is that it uses a retractable USB connector. A slider on top of the drive allows the USB connector to be retracted when not in use. The drive ships with a small strap that can be attached to the case allowing the drive to be placed on a key ring or similar.

Visually the little ATP EarthDrive is an attractive drive with a glossy black case on the top and sides and a white case on the bottom. The USB connector extension device is easy to operate. In areas other than the US, the ATP EarthDrive is packaged in cardboard recycled packaging.

To get an idea of how well the ATP EarthDrive performs, I used SiSoftware Sandra XII's removable storage benchmark. The ATP EarthDrive had a read speed of 30.33 MB/sec with 2MB files and a write speed of 5.40 MB/sec with the same file size. That makes the ATP EarthDrive much slower than the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB flash drive I tested previously.

To get an idea of the real world performance of the ATP EarthDrive, I moved a folder with 562MB of data to and from the ATP EarthDrive and timed the process with a stopwatch. It took 2 minutes and 6 seconds to write the folder to the drive and 28 seconds to read the folder from the flash drive back to the computer's internal hard drive.