USB Drives Benchmark

The need for speed keeps the enthusiast hunting down that perfect component or peripheral- be that the latest graphics card or a tiny USB drive. Which is precisely what we’re looking at today- a bunch of USB drives from manufacturers like SanDisk, Transcend, Imation, Kingston, Patriot and Memorette. Many of these drives come bundled with applications or even games which surely add to the overall value of these drives but that is certainly not what I’m looking at today. In fact, my first step after plugging a USB drive is to format it.

What I am going to show you today is the speed of the various USB drives I tested which range from capacities of 2GB to 64GB. For anyone who wants to argue about the limits of the USB bandwidth, I’ve thrown in the super fast Intel X-25M SSD connected through a USB to SATA dongle which, expectantly, produced the best numbers.

For testing, I used CrystalDiskMark 2.2 with a 100MB file and the number of runs was set to three. The system I used is a based on the Gigabyte X58 motherboard with an overclocked Core i7-920, 6GB of RAM and the ATI 5870 graphics card. The following graphs show the results of the Sequential, 512k and 4k Read and Write tests of CrystalMark.

Out of all the 4GB drives, the SanDisk Cruzer proves to be the fastest of the bunch. The fact that is also the best looking drive helps it make our favorite 4GB drive. The Patriot Xporter is an amazing drive overall and if you think that a higher capacity drive will always be faster, look at the 64GB Transcend JetFlash which proves to be slower than the Xporter in read tests.