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gadget — Episode 058 – The Tornado
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| The Tornado is a pocket sized device that weighs less than half a pound. The device is compatible with Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista — with a Mac compatible version currently in the works.
The Tornado is entirely self-contained. There are no drivers, no power adapters and no additional cables needed to use the device. The Tornado has a retractable 4ft chord and is entirely USB powered. The only indicator lights on the unit indicate when the unit connects to each client computer and when a transfer is in progress. Using the Tornado is easy — We not talking about regular easy here — but more like, could be used by a “World of Warcraft addict who has been awake and gaming for 8 straight-days while consuming nothing but hot pockets and red bull while watching Zena Warrior Princess reruns” easy. You simple extend the cable out of the Tornado, connect it to the two computers you want to link: it doesn’t matter which order, and wait. The software will automatically load and your Windows computer will display the Tornado as if it were a CD-ROM Drive. If you are using anything below Vista you may have to reboot the first time you connect the Tornado, but after that it really is a plug-and-play experience. We connected a XP desktop to a Vista notebook for the test. Within five seconds of plugging in the Tornado, the software autolaunched and we were greeted with the Tornado program, showing a split-screen representation of the two computers. Copying files was as simple as locating them in the window, then dragging and dropping them from one computer to another. The performance of the Tornado blew us away. We were expecting moderate performance, perhaps something just below sneakernet speeds, but definitely nothing like what DataDriveThrough had promised. We were able to transfer a 2.15GB file over the Tornado in just 112 seconds. That’s ~160Mbps. When we transferred a smaller, 108MB file, the performance increased to ~184Mbps, finishing the transfer in under 5 seconds. A 50MB file took 2.1 seconds for a performance of more than 196Mbps. This reversed the trend that we are accustomed to seeing with data transfer devices, which tend to drop their transfer rate with smaller files. Our results also lead us to believe that the bottleneck was not the Tornado or the 480Mbps USB 2.0 Bus, but rather the limitations of the client computers. In short… this thing smokes. The Tornado is available online for $60. Go to www.TheTornado.com to find out more. |
