If you saw the Dane-Elec Marvel Avengers USB DrivesSEE IT and fell in love (I know my geeky heart went pitter-patter) then you'll be smitten once again by Dane-Elec's Marvel Universe USB Flash Drives. These drives combine figures of fan-favorite superheroes—Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Wolverine ($13.49 direct each)—with 4GB of USB storage and extra digital content. With Iron Man being a regular member of the Avengers since the team's inception, and both Spider-Man and Wolverine currently part of the New Avengers line-up, you might say that these three drives are merely rounding out the collection started with the Dane-Elec Avengers USB Drives, but that's more comic-book nitpicking than anything else.

Design and Features
Each Marvel hero is set atop a plain base, which contains the sliding USB drive. Unlike the all-plastic Avengers USB drives, the Marvel Universe drives have a metal USB plug, and the sliding mechanism for extending and retracting the USB is much smoother than the one used on the Avengers drives.

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The Marvel drives have 4GB of storage space—as opposed to the 8GBs offered in the Avengers drives—but also include licensed Marvel content, an extra that you won't find offered on other drives. The drives have FAT32 formatting, so they are ready to go right out of the package, and are compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

The free comics are accessed with a code found on the bottom of the drive. To redeem the code, go to www.marvel.com/getcomics where you'll be asked to enter the code and set up an account with Marvel. For anyone buying one of these drives for a kid, this is a step that a parent definitely needs to supervise—the same page offers subscription sign-ups for $9.99 per month, or $59.88 for an annual subscription.

Also included on the drives are a collection of comic book covers, wallpapers, and custom icons featuring your drive's superhero. This extra content is a mixed bag. The icons are sort of cool, and instructions are included that will walk you through setting them up for a selected file. The included wallpapers are alright, but the covers are downright lousy. All are low resolution and blurry, but the quality is widely varied between one cover and the next and none are particularly good. On many of the covers, the quality is so poor that text is unreadable. Ultimately, the free month of digital comics is the content worth buying these drives for.

Price and Performance
At 4GB selling for $13.49 each, the Dane-Elec Marvel Universe USB Flash Drives come to approximately $3.37 per gigabyte. For a low-capacity flash drive with no encryption or password protection, this is a fairly high cost. By comparison, the Avengers drives were only $1.87 per gigabyte, while the Verbatim Store N' Go Clip-it USB DriveSEE IT sells for $1.83 per gigabyte. Our current Editors' Choice, the Kingston DataTraveler Locker+ G2 (16GB), sells for $1.56 per gigabyte, and includes 256-bit AES encryption. Looking at this pricing breakdown, it's clear that the Marvel Universe drives aren't going to be a value buy, but they are still reasonably priced and have sufficient extras to make them a worthwhile purchase for the die hard comics fan in your life.

While these are novelty drives, sold as toys and collectibles rather than high-performance storage, the performance isn't bad and falls in line with similarly priced drives. When tested using our timed file transfer test, the Marvel Universe drives had speeds of 30MBps (read) and 4MBps (write). The slower write speed means that you'll probably want a different drive for storing and transferring large media files, but for documents and photos, these drives will do just fine. Though the write speed is on the slow side, read speed is as good or better than several competitors, like the Verbatim Store N' Go Clip-it (15MBps read; 6MBps write) or the Victorinox Swiss Army Slim Flight (24MBps read; 6MBps write). They also offer better speeds than the Avengers drives (16MBps read; 4MBps write), though they still offer only half the capacity.

The Marvel Heroes USB Flash Drives may not boast any special powers, like encryption or password protection; for those sorts of features, take a look at the Editors' Choice Kingston DataTraveler Locker+ G2, which offers both. The Marvel Drives do, however, offer reasonably priced storage in a cool, collectible design that will have strong appeal for any comic book fan. Add the inclusion of free digital comics, wallpapers, and custom icons, and it's easy to see that these are great drives for any superhero fan.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Dane-Elec Marvel Universe USB Drives with several other flash drives side by side.

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