X-bit labs

Three USB 2.0 Flash Drives with 1GB Storage Capacity (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 10/28/2003 | 11:35 PM ]

A-Data USB 2.0 Speed Drive

Today the other two testing participants will come from the Taiwanese A-Data Company. Speed Drive is shipped in a vivid paper box with yellow and orange shiny coloring.

The drive is designed according to all the best traditions here. The plastic casing looks like aluminum and is of rounded shape. The company name and logo are designed in recognizable read and blue colors. The removable cap has a special clip, which will allow carrying the drive as a regular pen. Another carrying alternative is a neck band, which is included with the drive and which can be tied around a special hole in the drive case. The drive can be easily connected to any USB port, even if the surrounding ports are all packed, due to the cable, which is also included into the package. Sometimes, this cable can appear really worthy, because the drive itself is not that very small. There is an indicator LED on the upper edge of the case, and at the side there is a write protection switch. For compatibility with Windows 98 operating system, the manufacturer also supplies a CD-disk with the drivers.

The flash drive is 1GB big. However, the same product family also includes models from 64MB to 512MB. Of course, the flash drive supports USB 2.0 interface. The manufacturer claims that the drive reads at 7MB/s and writes at 2.4MB/s. The drive is supposed to stand up to 10 million erase cycles. The drive costs about $319.

Testbed and Methods

We used the following four software tools to find out which of the three flash drives is the fastest:

• SiSoftware Sandra Professional version 2003.7.9.73;
• FC-Test version 0.5.3;
• HD Tach 2.61;
• IOMark version 0.30b14.

For our tests we used the following computer system:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA 30715 15GB HDD;
• Radeon 7000 32MB graphics card;
• 256MB of DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4.

The flash drives were connected to the USB 2.0 port of the mainboard integrated controller and worked in a high-speed mode.