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January 25, 2007
Got your Flash USB Stick there?
With Vista Ready Boost able to use qualified Flash USB to speed up operations, it's become even more interesting what performance and speed we are getting out of various brands of Flash USB.
Because they are such a commodity, people just buy them from PC shops, supermarkets or Swap Meets and places like Kuala Lumpur's Low Yat Plaza.
However, there can be significant performance differences and such things can also be fakes with slower speeds.
I have an EagleTec 2Gb that I purchased from a Melbourne Swap Meet stall holder. This tests out at 4 Mb/sec Read and 6 Mb/sec Write. It's supposedly rated at 133x speed.
I bought a 2Gb Pretec i-Disk Tiny from a Low Yat Plaza stall holder. This is disappointing. It rates 3.3 Mb/sec Read and 1Mb/sec Write. The Write performance is abysmal. It's pretty small though and swivels so there's not USB cap loss but my EagleTec is even smaller.
There was an EagleTec lookalike at Low Yat but I had had problems with the EagleTec back clip breaking off - Now, I am quite happy to buy that shape again because I mixed 2 part epxoy resin and filled the non USB end with solid epoxy.
Apparently Windows Vista wants 2.5 Mb/sec using 4Kb blocks random read and 1.75 Mb/sec using 512 Kb blocks for random writes (quote from Ed Bott's article).
I didn't have a specific test program so simply used Steel Byte's HD-Speed (Warning: The Write test deletes your data and volume. For heaven's sake don't destroy your hard disk by choosing that to test. Of course, it will delete the data off the Flash USB that you are testing as well.)
So, how fast is yours?
(You can post your results as comments or at this Bleeding Edge Forum thread.)
Posted by Anandasim at January 25, 2007 03:33 PM
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