Manufacturer: N/A Price: $ N/A US Author: Chris Ittensohn Date: 07/23/2013

[ Introduction ]

Today we have a roundup of four USB flash drives from some very respectable companies – Silicon Power's B20 32GB, Super Talent’s SSD RC4 Express 32GB, SanDisk’s Extreme 65GB and Patriot’s Supersonic Magnum 64GB - all of which are USB 3.0 and aimed at speeding up your mobile data life. But, just being USB 3.0 does not guarantee top speeds at all, so this is a must read for anyone who has not looked at comparisons before... While a few years ago USB 2.0 could keep a good percentage of us all quite happy with our 4GB or 8GB sticks copying a few files, these days it just doesn’t seem to cut it. Now a few high quality images mixed in with a couple of videos and that 8GB stick is pretty much full. So we move to larger and larger flash drives, and on USB 2.0 that just won’t fly. With USB 3.0 being released years ago, you would think that your local department store would only stock flash drives with this technology. Sadly that just isn’t the case. Currently more often than not you will still be charged over $25 for a 16GB USB 2.0 stick, and hope for at best an extremely poor selection of USB 3.0 options. The main difference between USB 2.0 and 3.0 is a data rate throughput upgrade from 480 Mbits per second (48 MB/s) to 5Gbits per second (500MB/s). Unfortunately these numbers are ‘maximum’ throughput, and with many different factors coming into the equation I’m sure the bulk of us saw nothing like 48MB/s out of a USB 2.0 flash drive. Thankfully USB 3.0s claim of providing us 10x the transfer speeds of USB 2.0 can be true – but not always. So let’s check the specs of the four drives we have today, then get testing.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Silicon Power B20 – USB 3.0 32GB SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 64GB SuperTalent RC4 SSD USB 3.0 32GB Patriot Supersonic Magnum USB 3.0 64GB Test System Specs Benchmarks: File Download Performance Benchmarks: File Upload Performance Benchmarks: File Copy Test Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Conclusion Next Page ->

Vengance

Posted on: 07/25/2013 05:31 AM Good to see the Magnum is still one of the best.

Eric

Posted on: 09/09/2013 03:39 PM I'm VERY surprised to here you say that the Super Talent Express RC4 was a poor performer. Do you even know what this drive is for? It's for Windows2Go. For Windows to operate smoothly you need extremely fast 4k random reads and writes. And from your testing I can see that the RC4 was by FAR the fastest in those measures. This RC4 drive as extremely fast 4k random reads/writes. It's what it was made for. Comparing it's sequential writes to other flash drives isn't what we should be focused on. It's sequential read performance isn't even that important either, although it's the best in this metric it seems anyways. You should be focuses on 4k reads/writes. It's most important when running an OS. All the file transfer benchmarks you did handled all large files. Try doing a test that has all 4k random reads/writes. The RC4 would DOMINATE the competition. And a lot of the time when transferring files you have those 4kb random reads/writes. Especially when your dealing with an OS. Overall I find this review to be uninformative and misleading.

Eric

Posted on: 09/09/2013 03:47 PM You know that I think only 6 flash drives to date are certified for windows2go? The RC4 is one of them. The reason I own the RC4 is because I don't want my drive to ONLY be fast in sequential transfers. I want it to be fast at EVERYTHING. And although the sequential write speed is a little slow at only around 50mb/s I believe, it's still pretty darn fast. But mostly I'll be reading small and large files from the drive anyways as I use windows to go. And once you have downloaded the file you needed to the USB drive, you'll only be reading that from it each time you use it. So read performance is a lot more important than write performance anyways. And it's not the the write performance is bad overall. 4k random writes are VERY good. This drives 4k read/write performance is by FAR the best in the world to this day yet you don't give the drive credit for that. You also don't say why 4k random reads and writes are so important. I transfer a lot of files, and more often than not, they are not only sequential. Ever notice how your copying something and it goes by really fast at first but then slows down really fast? That's cause it gets to the small files and bogs down. I don't want to bog down. I want to keep it going fast. To your readers I would suggest them to read the 4k random read/write benchmarks again and look at how much faster the RC4 is that the other top drives. From what I remember it's over 10x as fast as the second place drive.

Chris Ittensohn Posts: 3 Joined: 2013-06-11

Posted on: 09/10/2013 05:25 AM Hi Eric, thanks for the comments and I trust you feel better now. We may run a Windows2Go roundup in the future, but, this was not what this review was aimed at and SuperTalent were aware of this when sending the review sample. As SuperTalent have advertised, 'Read speed : 320MB/s, Write speed : 120MB/s' with no disclaimers at all - 'The USB 3.0 Express RC4 is an ultimate combination of speedy performance, price, and usability'. This is what we have an issue with as the price is not justified for general use / general statements such as this.

Eric

Posted on: 09/12/2013 03:47 PM I can agree with you there that Super Talent should probably note that the RC4 has unmatched 4k read/write performance. And they should go into more detail other than just the max sequential speeds. I just thought it would have been nice had you noted how much the RC4 dominated the 4k read/write results and also added why that is so important. Just so the reader gets the bigger picture. I'm happy that you replied to me, and because of that I'll keep in touch with your website. Thank you.