Performance

USB 3.0

The Mach Xtreme GX flash drive has a "turbo" mode which can be applied by downloading the software from the Mach Xtreme website. MX advertises a speed of up to 140 MB/s when using this application, but refrains from revealing the performance without such support. Without the app, the GX flash drive has a very erratic performance curve, but manages to push out a respectable 73.7 MB/s read performance. With the turbo mode, the unit actually manages to deliver what the company promises, hitting exactly 140 MB/s. While this is certainly impressive, odds are you cannot go ahead and install the application on every PC you will be using the flash drive on. Write speeds of up to 30 MB/s are true as well, as there are little spikes in turbo mode, but the unit averages out at just above 24 MB/s. This does not really change much when using it in "normal" mode.


ATTO shows us a bit higher performance, because only the first area of the drive is used for the benchmark. Even though things top out at 100 MB/s read, this only applies to the first 1.5 GB space, as the oscillating performance appears after that point. Similar to that, the write speeds - especially in turbo mode - are higher than advertised, this could be due to how the application handles small files. In reality the performance benefit is not as big.


As USB 3.0 drives are just starting to push into the market, we have also started to create a comparison graph of these drives. This will be expanded as we review more flash drives in the future. As you can see, in turbo mode the drive manages to best even the more expensive FX version, while it is beat by the ADATA Nobility N005 when used in a traditional manner.

USB 2.0

Taking a quick look at the USB 2.0 performance of the drive, HD Tach reports a very good 32.6 MB/s read but a mere 16.0 MB/s write. While there are spikes of up to 24 MB/s write speed, these are very rare.


It seems like that the best speeds are attained when using smaller file sizes, as ATTO goes up to 8 MB with the default bench, but even so, the write performance stays at a mere 15 MB/s. Most USB 2.0 stick can do better than this.