Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• OCZ Rally 1GB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1 GB
• OCZ Roadster 1 GB
• Super Talent RBST 1 GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
• Verbatim Store'n'Go Pro 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 drive scores right in the middle of the pack. 16.2MB/s are just about half of what the PD7 delivers. So this may not be the fastest, but that is truly not why you would be buying this flash drive.


The A-DATA RB19 shines when it comes to access times. The company advertises the use for ReadyBoost and with 0.7ms it will certainly work well with access times below 1ms.


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. Write speeds are just over 5 MB/s while ATTO confirms the read performance result of HD Tach.

Waterproof?

A-DATA states that the RB19 is not only water resistant but water proof. So I took a (somewhat dirty) glass, filled it with water and dropped the RB19 into the liquid. It was left in there for about 10 minutes, while I was attending to other chores. After this It was taken out and dried. I made sure that the USB connector was dry, as I did not want to short my USB 2.0 connector on the mainboard. It worked flawlessly right away and I was able to read and write data to the RB19 without any problems.