Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
• A-Data MyFlash PD7 1 GB
• A-Data PD17 Flash Drive 1 GB
• A-Data PD18 Flash Drive 2 GB
• A-Data Pirates Flash Drive 2 GB
• A-Data RB19 Flash Drive 1 GB
• ATP ToughDrive Mini 2 GB
• ATP ToughDrive 2 GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1 GB
• OCZ Rally 1 GB
• OCZ Roadster 1 GB
• PQI Intelligent Drive i810 1 GB
• PQI Travelling Disk i221 1 GB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Super DH Series 200x 1 GB
• Super Talent RBST 1 GB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Verbatim Store'n'Go Pro 2 GB

For the record, we tested the drive before we tried to break it.




ATP's number one spot only lasted a few weeks. The OCZ ATV Turbo 4 GB is the fastest USB drive we have ever seen when it comes to raw reading performance.


Access time is an important feature for Windows Vista ReadyBoost. OCZ's ATV Turbo delivers a very good result here too with an access time of 1.0 ms.


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. It surprised me though that the stick had a write speed of only 10 MB/s. I tested this on i975X, P35 and AMD 690G and always got the same result.


Since other reviewers had higher scores I asked Jon from XSReviews to test on his DFI Lanparty SLI-DR, 3500+ which uses an NVIDIA chipset. As you can see the write speeds now get close to the advertised 26 MB/s, but write speed dropped a little bit compared to my setup.