X-bit labs

Five USB Flash-Drives Roundup /part 2/

Category: Storage

by FastSite

[ 01/28/2003 | 12:00 AM ]

There are several reasons for flash drives as small as a lighter or trinket to grow in popularity. Today we will take a closer look at five 256MB USB flash drives and their attractive features as well as their drawbacks. The testing participants are: HandyDrive from Apacer, EasyDisk from Shenzhen Luwen Electronics, JetFlash from Transcend, Mobile Disk from TwinMOS and unknown but very interesting USByte.

TwinMOS Mobile Disk

Those who value good and fast memory for PC should know TwinMOS name. Yeah, this company was one of the first to start mass production of DDR400 modules, but today we are more interested in TwinMOS' achievements in the flash drive area. The storage capacities of Mobile Disk devices can vary from 32MB to 768MB. The company also offers some pretty unusual 384MB storage media, but we tested a 256MB model.

TwinMOS Mobile Disk comes in a nice transparent plastic box. The box also includes a USB extension cable, a string to wear the drive around your neck, a CD with drivers and utilities, and a one-page manual.

Mobile Disk is the biggest among all models we covered in our today's roundup. Its length is 93mm, width - 24mm, depth - 12mm. The weight of the device is 20gram.

If TwinMOS engineers had wanted to make the Mobile Disk a little smaller, they could have done it without any problems. At least 10mm of length could have been easily removed. The point is that there is a LED inside the butt end of the device. When the Mobile Disk is connected to the PC, this LED is constantly blinking. It's blinking somewhat more often when the drive is accessed. Actually, this blinking is an annoying thing as sometimes it seems that the system is working with the drive, although it is not true.

As for ergonomics, we find Mobile Disk not very convenient to use from our personal experience. Of course it is good that it has a clip to wear it in a pocket like a pen. But the ear to put the string into is aside, so it will hang askew around the neck. Not very handsome-looking, you see. It's also too long to put it into the lighter pocket of your jeans. The read-only switch is placed aside and can be turned on and off only with some very thin thing.

Despite all this criticism, we discovered almost no problems concerning the easy connection to the PC. This drive fits in between the occupied PS/2 and COM ports, but if the next USB port has something in it, the flash drive will be plugged in at an angle and get pressed against the neighboring USB device.

TwinMOS Mobile Disk has a smart security system. You can install a special program from the enclosed CD, its icon will then appear in the system tray. The program can divide the disk into two zones. One is for common use, and the other is secret and for authorized access only. The user chooses the size of each zone.

After this manipulation, the public zone will only be available. In order to access the security zone, you will need to enter the password. Here you have even got the opportunity to enter a hint in case you forget the password.

After you enter the password, the two zones interchange their roles and now you can only access the security one. After the flash drive is disconnected from the PC, or the user chooses the "Log Out" option from the security program's menu, the zones swap once again and the public zone only will become active. The software bundle also includes a low-level formatting utility. It can merge together the two zones even if the user forgot the password. In this case, the drive will still be ready to work, but the info from the security zone will be lost.

USByte

Actually, we couldn't find out who is producing USByte drives. It is a pity as this product is rather interesting and differs a lot from the others we reviewed here.

USByte comes in a small paper box. It's accompanied by a USB extension cable, a user's manual, a 3" CD with drivers and a neck-string. Note that the drivers come on a small, 3" CD, not a usual 5" one.

USByte flash drive is the smallest in our review. With the cap on, its dimensions are 75x23x10mm. The weight of the device isn't marked in the specifications, but we can say that it's about 15gram.

USByte is the only drive in our roundup to boast a metal case. It's made of two layers: the plastic case covered with a metal shell. The cap is also metal-made. The documentation doesn't say what metal is used, but we guess it's aluminum.

This drive has no clip, only a small crossbar in its butt end to put the neck-string in. The ledges on the front panel of the drive help to hold it firmly. Beneath the "USByte" label, there is a hole in the case through which you can see the LED. It's glowing red all the time when the drive is connected to the PC.

The read-only switch is placed at the back of the device, in a groove. It can only be turned on or off with some thin tool: a small screwdriver or a needle.

The smallest flash drive among our today's testing participants quite naturally has no problems plugging into the USB port. If PS/2, COM and the next USB ports are all occupied, it still gets easily plugged, just like the EasyDisk.

USByte can protect the stored information from third parties, but the protection system is not user-friendly. Seems like USByte manufacturer went too far in building up the secure system and made it too complicated for the end-user. First of all, USByte is the only drive of the five reviewed, which requires installing drivers even for WindowsXP. To be exact, it requires not drivers, but the security software. During the first use, it will ask you for the drivers CD and will install a special utility. This utility will ask for password whenever you connect the drive to the PC. That is, if you want to connect the flash drive to a PC it hasn't been connected to before, you will need a CD with drivers besides the drive itself. Of course, the 3" CD is small and can even be carried in the same pocket with the USByte, but we thinks it's a poor implementation of data protection. Especially, if we compare it to what the EasyDisk has.

After the installation, USByte will ask for the password. By default, we have "1234" password, which you'd better change for something less evident. The system recognizes the drive as two devices: two drives. One of them has 1MB capacity, the other: all the remaining 255MB. At first, this division may seem confusing, but you will get the point later. For people who don't want to keep much of their info secret, the USByte will prove unhandy as it always asks for the password, even when there is no password specified. We also have some serious doubts about the efficiency of the security system, but as we are not into hacking that much, let's not dwell upon it now :).

USByte cannot be used for booting up the system. And in general, it makes an impression of an under-developed product, but it is solely our subjective opinion.

Flash Drives Subjective Comparison

Well now, it's time to throw all the reviewed USB flash drives into one heap. First of all, we offer a table listing all the main specs of the reviewed drives.

The only subjective parameter, the easiness of connection to the PC was determined according to our own scale. As we have already mentioned in this article, we took a mainboard with two USB ports situated between the PS/2 and COM ports. One USB port was occupied by a standard cable, thus emulating some USB device (there are a lot of them in the market now). The keyboard and mouse were plugged into the PS/2 ports, the upper COM port was also occupied. Here is the detailed description of the evaluation scale we used:

• If the flash drive could be plugged into the remaining USB port without the extension cable, it received 5 points;
• If the drive got pressed against the next USB cable because of its thickness, it received 4 points;
• If the drive got connected to the USB port and also prevented the use of the other USB port, it got 3 points;
• Beside that, if the drive couldn't be installed unless the upper COM port is empty, it received 2 points;
• If the drive could only be plugged via the cable, even if the PS/2 devices impeded it, it received 1 point.

We have already paid a lot of attention to the external highs and lows of each drive, now let's estimate their speed characteristics.

Testbed and Methods

Most manufacturers specify the nominal read and write speeds of their flash drives. Sometimes the numbers are true, in some cases they are greatly overstated. When buying a small-capacity (16MB-31MB) USB drive, its speed may be of little importance. But when we talk about devices that can store a couple of hundreds of megabytes, their performance is worth mentioning.

Testbed configuration looks as follows:

• Intel Celeron 2000MHz CPU;
• ABIT IT7-MAX2 mainboard;
• 256MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM;
• 15GB ,7200rpm IBM DTLA HDD;
• Albatron GeForce4 MX440-8x graphics card;
• Creative SBLive! Value audio card;
• 24x CD-ROM;
• WindowsXP Professional.

The mainboard is equipped with an integrated USB 2.0 VIA VT6202 controller. We used the 480Mbit/sec USB 2.0 interface. It's backward-compatible with the USB 1.1, so we had no problems connecting the flash drives to a faster USB 2.0 port.

Write caching onto mobile devices was turned off in WindowsXP (it's done by checking "Optimize for Quick Removal" option in drive's properties). This way the obtained results are "pure".

We used the following software sets:

• Ziff Davis WinBench 99 2.0;
• SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro.

During the tests, we wanted to answer two questions. Here they are:

• How great is the performance of the reviewed USB flash drive models?
• How does the capacity of a flash drive affect its performance? (For this test we will use three drives of different storage capacity produced by the same manufacturer.)

Performance

Now comes the first part of our benchmarking session: performance comparison of the reviewed USB flash drives.

Curiously enough, the access time may vary dramatically by different flash drive models: up to 10 times! Also as you can see, the CPU workload depends a lot on the controller used in the drive. Overall, USByte is unrivalled in WinBench99 and HandyDrive is the second fastest. EasyDisk is worst of all and takes the last but one place in all the tests (its "competitor" - Mobile Disk - was at least the best in the CPU utilization test). Now, let's go over to the more synthetic Sandra 2002 Pro.

The last diagram sums up the results in Sandra 2002 test set. No need to comment. We would only like to note that Mobile Disk is the first in all Sandra 2002 tests, unlike WinBench 99, where it showed very low read speed.

After that, we decided to check the drives' performance in real tasks, like reading and writing data via the operation system.

During the first part of the test a folder containing 1482 files with the total size of 241MB was copied from the HDD to the USB flash drive. Then the OS was re-booted and the folder was copied back from the flash drive onto the HDD. The copy speeds were written down as read and write speeds of the flash drive respectively. As the HDD speed is much higher than that of a flash drive, it didn't affect the results. So, they do reflect the performance of the flash drives as is.

The second part of the test was the same as the first one, with that only difference that we copied one 241MB file instead of a number of small files.

As we see, Mobile Disk from TwinMOS is the best in real-life tasks, with Apacer HandyDrive is close behind. The remaining drives proved considerably slower than the leaders.

Now, let's check the dependence of the flash drive performance on its storage capacity. We took EasyDisk models of 256, 128 and 64MB storage capacity. All the drives processed the same 60MB file. Just like in the previous test, the file was copied in Windows XP Explorer from the HDD to the flash drive and back again.

The little difference in write time can be considered a measurement error. So, we see that unlike hard disk drives, the performance of flash drives doesn't depend on their storage capacity and is only determined by the flash memory used.

Conclusion

USB flash drives have evident advantages over many other storage media, especially over the out-dated 1.44MB diskettes. Higher capacity, smaller dimensions, high reliability, and noiselessness - these are their strong points among others. As for drawbacks, they are very few and only crop up when we compare USB flash drives with IDE HDDs, CD-RW drives, magneto-optic data media and the like.

Among the flash drives we have reviewed today, EasyDisk seems most easy-to-use. It connects to the PC without any problems, features a good data security system and small dimensions. It also can serve as a boot-up disk. But its average performance doesn't allow calling it the ideal drive.

As for the least successful one today, it's unfortunately, Apacer HandyDrive. Although it did well in WinBench99, it is not very convenient to connect to the PC, has no data security system and cannot be used for system booting. However, we don't want to call it a bad solution as well, because its high file copy speed in Windows deserves all the best.

To tell the truth, we were a bit disappointed with the most expensive Transcend JetFlash drive. It appeared a rather average product. The drive performed not fast enough and proved not really convenient to use. We would say that it is not worth the money it sells at.

The main drawback of USByte is the necessity to carry the drivers CD (even a 3" one) together with the drive to be able to use it with other computers.

As for TwinMOS Mobile Disk, its design is its weakest spot. It is not a thing to wear around your neck. It does best in Sandra 2002 Pro and during file copying in Windows, but it proves rather average in WinBench99.

To wind up our today's roundup, we would like to say that it is not really important what flash drive is the best now. The main thing is the upcoming trend towards the use of these devices. We guess this trend is quite evident.