X-bit labs

Three USB 2.0 Flash Drives with 1GB Storage Capacity (page 4)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

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

Performance in FC-Test

File Copy test was used to measure how long it will take the drive to create a 1024KB file, how fast it will then read it and copy onto the system HDD and back.

A-Data Agenie and Super Talent Flash pen Drive perform almost equally fast when creating the file. A-Data Speed Drive lags noticeably behind them. The same situation repeats when we do the reading: A-Data Speed Drive again falls behind the leaders. When we do the file copy to the HDD, the gap between the leaders and the third testing participant turns smaller. However, when we copy the file from the HDD back to the flash drive, A-Data Speed Drive finally wins. The second one appears Super Talent Flash Pen Drive and the last one comes A-Data Agenie.

Performance in IOMark and HDTach

With the help of HDTach utility we measured the access time. IOMark tool was used to measure the read and write speeds.

The graphs below represent the peak linear read and write speeds for our testing participants:

A-Data Agenie

A-Data Speed Drive

Super Talent Flash Pen Drive

The access time appeared almost identical by A-Data Agenie and Super Talent Flash Pen Drive. The second A-Data device, Speed Drive, shows stably lower results, and to tell the truth I do not know what caused this drastic difference in performance. I even ran all tests anew, but the results repeated. All the other numbers are more or less close. Only the linear writing of the Super Talent Flash Pen Drive appeared slower than that of the competitors.

Conclusion

So, we tested three 1GB compact flash drives in order to find out, which of them is the fastest. In fact, I cannot say that any of them is much faster than the others. The numeric results are pretty even and do not allow us to draw a conclusion like that. The only exception is Sandra benchmark where the performance difference is very significant, and HDTach with its access time measurements. In the first case, it is probably the used algorithm that we should blame, while the reasons for the low performance in the second case remained unknown.

As you can see, the three devices cost pretty different money: the difference makes about $40. therefore, if you care about the price in the first place, then you should go for Super Talent Flash product. If you value convenient use, you’d better decide on a device from A-Data, which are accompanied with software CDs, USB cables and neck bands. However, you will have to pay extra for the additional accessories, don’t forget about it.