Quite recently we compared five flash drives with the USB 1.1 interface (see our Five USB Flash-Drives Roundup for details), but now there are already USB 2.0 flash drives in the market. To tell you the truth, we were rather skeptical about the newcomers. The speeds of USB 1.1 drives fall short from the theoretically possible 12Mbit/s, so we thought the use of the faster USB 2.0 wouldn’t improve the situation a lot. If you are an owner of a flash drive, you might agree with us: most devices like that are rather slow. But there is only one way to make sure: check it all out ourselves. As soon as USB 2.0 flash drives appeared in stores, we took a sample and compared it to a USB 1.1 drive. So, our participants today are A-Data Speed Drive with USB 2.0 interface and Digitex PenDrive with USB 1.1. Both are of 256MB capacity.

But let’s first talk about the USB 2.0 standard. This standard, also known as High-Speed USB, is an evolutionary development of USB 1.1. It was intended for fast peripheral devices, like scanners, digital cameras and external drives. The maximum theoretical speed of USB 2.0 exceeds that of USB 1.1 by 40 times: 480Mbit/s against 12Mbit/s! USB 2.0 is backward-compatible with USB 1.1, thus it’s possible to plug a USB 1.1 device into a USB 2.0 connector. In this case, the data-exchange speed would be no more than 12Mbit/s – the speed of USB 1.1. Moreover, you can also connect USB 2.0 devices to USB 1.1 ports! Thanks to the backward compatibility as well as to higher bandwidth of USB 2.0 bus, this interface is rapidly gaining popularity. All modern chipsets have integrated USB 2.0 controllers. Mainboards that are not based on USB 2.0 supporting chipsets often carry additional USB 2.0 controllers onboard. They are often implemented by means of VIA VT6202 chips or NEC controllers. As for software support, all manufacturers of USB 2.0 controllers offer optimized, stable drivers for different Windows versions. Thus, we see that the PC market has moved from USB 1.1 to 2.0 and it’s now very reasonable to use up all the advantages of the high-speed USB 2.0 for data storage and transportation devices, including flash drives.

Closer Look: A-Data SpeedDisk

Flash disks of the Speed Drive series from A-Data were among the first to feature the USB 2.0 interface. They come in a simple plastic package.

The package reads: “USB 2.0 Flash Memory Drive”. The label shows the capacities of the Speed Drive series: 32, 64, 128, 256, 512MB and 1GB. At the back side of the package there’s a label:

We see the line “Support USB 2.0 up to 480Mb/s” and the promised speeds:

• Read – up to 7MB/s;
• Write – up to 5MB/s.