Hot Deal: 4GB Corsair USB Flash Drive for $99 AR

[jtr1962]

The 4GB PNY Optima I bought a few months back at Staples tests at 20 MB/sec for large file reads, about what Stereodude is getting. I didn't do any tests for small files, but don't forget that with a flash drive, even reading lots of small files shouldn't be much of a hit on performance due to the low latency. After all, low latency is really what flash drives are about.

 

[Stereodude]

The 4GB PNY Optima I bought a few months back at Staples tests at 20 MB/sec for large file reads, about what Stereodude is getting. I didn't do any tests for small files, but don't forget that with a flash drive, even reading lots of small files shouldn't be much of a hit on performance due to the low latency. After all, low latency is really what flash drives are about.

Reading small files isn't that hard to do quickly, most flash drives have a hard time writing them quickly. This Buffalo drive almost seems to be an anomaly. Xbit FC Test 1.0 Xbit FC Test 2.0

 

[mubs]

Insanely fast flash:

Intel, Micron claim their flash is greased lightning

NAND that’s not all

By INQUIRER staff: Friday, 01 February 2008, 8:13 AM

MICRON and Intel said they jointly developed NAND flash memory offering five times performance over existing memory types.

The joint venture they control - IM Flash Technologies - announced that high speed NAND it will make can deliver 200 megabytes per second at read speeds, and 100MB/s for write speeds.

They have used a specification for NAND called ONFI 2.0 and combine that with a four plane architecture to give higher clock speeds.

The devices will be used in hybrid hard drives, for digital video cameras, and take advantage of USB 3.0, when that’s released. USB 3.0 will offer 10 times the bandwidth of USB 2.0 giving about 4.8 gigabits a second.

 

[Stereodude]

Yep. I believe you, but those numbers seem almost impossibly fast, particularly for small files.

Ok, so I did some more testing on another machine (work laptop). This thing has PGP disk encryption on it, so that could be a factor into the numbers. Anyhow...

Using the same set of large files (1.07GB and 31 files) writing to the USB drives I got 62 seconds with the Buffalo and 170 seconds with the Corsair 2GB FV. Reading I got 54 seconds for the Buffalo, and 66 seconds for the Corsair FV.

Using a different set of small files (88.8MB, 454 files, 8 folders) writing I got 21 seconds for the Buffalo, 202 seconds for the Corsair FV, and 29 seconds for my 512MB OCZ Rally2. Reading I got 8 seconds for the Buffalo, 9 seconds for the Corsair FV, and 9 seconds for the OCZ.