Ars Technica 2009 Flash drive roundup

[Trooper110]

Small wonders: the 2009 Ars USB flash drive roundup - Ars Technica

[Cain]

Conclusions

Compared to past flash drive reviews, this current crop of drives is really amazing. Drives these days are far faster than anything we have seen, and when considering how much a flash drive now holds, we certainly need these high throughputs. That said, it looks like current flash memory technology is too fast for USB2.0 to handle, as we witnessed many different drives saturate the USB2 bus in many of the read tests. As such, it is not surprising that virtually every drive has similar read speeds to the next guy. But not all flash drive manufacturers are standing still because of the USB2 limitations. OCZ has put out the very impressive Throttle which pushes 90MB/sec in eSATA mode. Similarly, Patriot has fined tuned its memory controller so that it not only has very fast read speeds, but fast writes, too.


Best Drives for fastest read/write speeds: The award here goes to both the OCZ Throttle and the Patriot Xporter XT. Both have very fast read and write speeds in USB2 mode. The OCZ Throttle also has a ridiculously fast eSATA mode. The Patriot Xporter XT has a Lifetime warranty (compared to the Throttle's 2-year warranty).


Best Bang-for-your-Buck: As long as you don't mind the tiny size of the drive, the Super*Talent Pico-B is actually quite a strong performer despite the low price. If you need something more substantial to hold on to, the SanDisk Cruzer Micro is a good bet.

Epilogue: Are flash drives a ?commodity??

Generally speaking, yes, flash drives are a commodity by now. As long as you do not get tricked into buying old flash drives from 2 or 3 years ago, it pretty much does not matter which drive you pick these days. But do not think that it will stay this way for long. USB2 flash drives are generally the same in terms of speed because they have all hit the maximum read speeds for USB2. But when eSATA and/or USB3 become as ubiquitous as USB2 is now, you can be certain that there will be another generation of drives that vary greatly in terms of speed and performance.