Best Pendrives

Clash of the Pen Drives...

Alright here is the result of a lot of free time, and a lot of portable storage (used and unused) collected over a period of time. It came to precipitation when in one of my whims I bought a SanDisk Titanium 4GB USB flash drive, supposedly one of the fastest out there.

The Contenders

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The contenders, big and small I used for the tests were as follows:

From left to right: 
- SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB
- Kingston DataTraveler 4GB (old version)
- Kingston DataTraveler 2GB
- Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB
- Kingston DataTraveler 4GB (new ) 

Additionally, not in the picture but included in the benchmarks were a Transcend JetFlash 4GB drive and my Philips GoGear 2GB mp3 player. The pendrive is to test, the player is in the mix just for fun!

All drives were formatted to FAT 32 and benched on the same rig, same port, with the same number of applications in the background.Anyhow, I later found that formatting a drive or leaving data in it had no effect on the benches.


The Numbers

Read Speeds : The SanDisk duo are right on top!

Burst Speeds: The SanDisk drives are still on top, but the real surprise came from the Philips GoGear!

CPU utilization 

Random Access times:

Sorry for not putting up much text - the charts really took a lot of my time and attention!Let's let the pictures do the talking!

SanDisk does make good products, worth the extra money, but the CPU usage is also higher - a trade-off for greater performance.

As a side note:I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on the SanDisk in 37 mins or so, and the system booted up in 20 seconds flat! Compared to the previous installation on the Transcend 4GB that that used to take over 40 seconds to boot up and over 2 hours to install, that is a very significant improvement!

Conclusion

To summarize the test results, here is what I can say about them. 
SanDisk 

Pros
- excellent build quality for both pen drives, good fit and finish.
- Faster transfer speeds, than peers

Cons
- Expensive (moderately)
- Higher CPU utilization

Kingston/Transcend

Pros
- Cheap
- Decent VFM performers
- Lower CPU utilization

Cons
- Build quality flimsy though Kingston is better than Transcend in this regard
- Transfer speeds can be really slow


So Choose according to which drive suits you best. - Cheers