Fast USB 2.0 Flash Drives
Posted October 18th, 2009 by admin No Comments »
Group Test Anyone else remember how the death of the floppy disk was supposed to mean the end of the ‘sneakernet’ – files exchanged physically on a handy, portable storage format?
It never happened. Instead, floppies were briefly replaced by higher-capacity media like Iomega’s Zip disk and then, when USB really took off, Flash drives. Nowadays, Flash drives are so ubiquitous you can pick low-capacity ones up for nowt at trade fairs.
Flash for Freedom: L-R Corsair Voyager 128, Patriot Xporter XT, Sony Click Excellence, Lexar Lightning and Kingston DataTraveler
The freebies might do for some folk, but plenty of us prefer something rather faster than oh-so-slow giveaways. USB 2.0 helped a lot, but there’s still room for improvement, and drive makers are pushing ever faster drives. USB 3.0 will change the game, but it’ll be a while before compatible Flash drives arrive – let alone low-cost ones.
We asked the main Flash key makers to lend us their fastest drives. We’ve focused on speed, but we’ve factored in portability, solidity and price when we came to choose our Recommended and Editors’ Choice products.
The drive sequential and random read and write speeds were tested using CrystalDiskMark 2.2 running on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 machine. The drives were set not to use Windows’ disk cacheing. Read the rest of this entry »
