Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• OCZ Rally 1GB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1GB
• OCZ Roadster 1GB
• Super Talent RBST 1GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
• SuperTalent RBST 1 GB
• A-Data MyFlash PD7 1 GB
• A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

We used HDTach in the following two benchmarks.


The read bandwidth of the Pirates flash drive is about average.


With an 8.4 ms access time the drive is far from being the fastest, but it is acceptable for most users. The drive will work in ReadyBoost.

To get a feeling how the speed with different sized files is, we used the ATTO disk benchmark.


Like with all drives, performance gets better, the bigger the data chunks are. Also common to all USB sticks is that writes are slower than reads. Optimum file size is 64KB or bigger for maximum performance. In daily use you will almost never see files smaller than 64KB.
Unfortunately the write performance is extremely low when using smaller chunk sizes, so this drive is best used with bigger files.