comparing the speed of usb drives
The other day, I was frustrated with how hard it is to find speed ratings for USB flash drives. It seems like only the expensive ones publish their read and write performance, and it is not clear if they are worth the extra money. So, I decided to do my own little comparison test before I buy one for my son who is going off to college in a few weeks. 
I was surprised to see how many different drives I have around the house:
- Ironkey 4GB, "the world's most secure flash drive"
- Sandisk Cruzer Contour 8GB
- Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB
- PNY Swivel 4GB (Very small)
- Sandisk Cruzer Micro 1GB (This is an old one.)
- RiData EZ Twister 4GB (I bought this one because it has a write-protect switch.)
The test was simple: Use TeraCopy to write and then read two different batches of files. When its done, TeraCopy shows the performance in megabytes per second (MB/s); that's the number I published here. For the small file test, I used a batch of 48 files in one directory, total size 30MB. For the large file test, I used two files totaling 1.33GB (although for the 1GB drive, I only used one file for 669MB).
Here are my results. All numbers are MB/s, so bigger is better.
| USB Drive | Small File Read |
Small File Write |
Large File Read |
Large File Write |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ironkey 4GB | 17 | 2.8 | 22 | 13 |
| Sandisk Cruzer Contour 8GB | 12 | 5.3 | 21 | 13 |
| Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB | 13 | 4.7 | 16 | 7.5 |
| PNY Swivel 4GB | 13 | 1.9 | 18 | 5.6 |
| Sandisk Cruzer Micro 1GB | 12 | 2.9 | 15 | 4.7 |
| RiData EZ Twister | 12 | 1.5 | 16 | 3.7 |
Clearly, you get better performance when you spend more. I was disappointed to see the RiData come in with low-end performance because this drive is part of their "business" line. The ironkey had great numbers, but that's not a good general purpose drive. And the Cruzer Contour is somewhat bulky. In the end, I decided to buy a Cruzer Titanium for my son.
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