Cruzer Micro Flash Drive Review - Performance
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The drive performs very well indeed; when tested with HD Tach (a low-level drive benchmarking tool) the average read speed varied between 27.6 and 28.9MB/s, which to put in context is only about 10 MB/s slower than a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda. Average seek time was just as impressive at 0.8MS, which is about the same as what you'd expect from most average hard drives.
I was unable to use the benchmarking software to test write speed due to the U3 partition on the drive (U3 works by creating a mounted partition from which to run applications, like a virtual CD drive), but in a manual test, copying a single 350MB file to the drive took 41 seconds, giving an average write speed of 8.5MB/s. The following screen shot shows the results from the extended HD Tach speed test:
Another great feature of the drive is that it is compatible with Vista's ReadyBoost system (as the previous speed tests for both reading and writing confirmed), which provides your computer with additional high speed system memory (although nowhere near as fast as standard DDR RAM). Some aspects of your computing experience, such as boot times, will not be improved with ReadyBoost, but other tasks, such as using memory-intensive applications where heavy paging occurs, can see big improvements, so it's good to have this feature available just in case it's required.
The size and the high read/write speeds of the Cruzer micro also mean that you can install an operating system, such as Linux or Windows XP onto the drive and boot a (modern) computer from the flash drive instead of from the system drive. Some additional system configuration and a non-standard install to the drive will be required to make use of this feature, and U3 may need to be removed from the drive before this will work.
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