Read performance benchmarks
Before we begin, we wanted to mention again that all the drives in this review are USB 2.0 Hi-Speed drives. Although these drives do not utilize all the bandwidth of USB 2.0 (480Mbps), all of these drives perform better than any USB 1.1 Flash drive. So just by merit of being a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed drive, each one is much faster than any USB 1.1 drive. That said, it would be easy to think that all the drives in this review perform the same, but of course, this is not the case. Some are clearly better than others.
The results for the PC platform were widely varied. SiSoft Sandra gives only a few data points, but shows that each drive performs differently from the next.
As shown in the graph, all drives start off rather slow at the rather small file size of 512 bytes. The slowest drive out of the gates was the SanDisk drive averaging 210KB/sec. The fastest was the Iomega drive moving lots of 512-byte files at an average of 552KB/sec, trailed closely by the Fuji drive at 535KB/sec and the SimpleTech and Transcend drives at 495KB/sec. Compared to the ZIP100 (25KB/sec) and the USB 1.1 drive (75KB/sec), these drives are fast. Although, just by looking at the graph it should be clear that there is a throughput penalty for dealing with such small bursts of data since none of the drives were even close to their rated read speeds.
Progressing to 32KB, 256KB, and 2MB file sizes really allowed these drives to show their stuff. The fastest drives at reading are the Fujifilm, Transcend, and Iomega. All three consistently averaged throughput in the 8 to 10MB/sec range. The next fastest group is comprised of the SanDisk, SimpleTech, and the Verbatim drives. Those three showed strong throughput in the 6 to 8MB/sec range; not too far from the leading drives. Bringing up the rear are the Mushkin and the PNY drives. Putting in solid scores between 4 and 5MB/sec, these drives are half as fast as the fastest drives in this review. To be honest, we were a bit surprised that two well-known memory manufacturers had the two slowest throughput scores. Although we would be remiss if we did not point out that even the slowest drives in this group are four to five times faster than the older USB 1.1 and ZIP 100 drives. Something to keep in mind, especially if you do not care about speed as much as features.
On the Mac, we used SpeedTools QuickBench on a 1.33Ghz PowerBook G4. (A few benchmarks were also performed on a dual PowerMac G5, but we found out quickly that the performance was virtually the same at the G4.)
QuickBench gives many more data points and shows how the drives ramp up much better than Sandra's benchmark. What is most interesting about the Mac benchmarks is that the group stays together until the 8KB file size. At this point, the PNY and the Mushkin drives diverge and begin to fall behind the pack. This phenomenon does not happen again until the 32KB mark where the Transcend drive attempts to pull away from the pack. Interestingly enough, the SanDisk ends up finishing faster than the Fujifilm drive (a direct contradiction to the PC benchmarks.) Oddly, all drives appear to peak at 128KB file sizes. This is rather fascinating, because on the PC platform, the drives continue to climb in speed, even up to 2MB. Overall, the Mac appears to perform nearly as well as the PC. The difference is likely due to the fact that we are running two different applications on two different operating systems.
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