Flash Drives are Taking Over - Testing out flash drives
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One of the advantages of flash drives is that they are very quick; using the high speed USB 2.0 interface, flash drives have the potential to transfer data much faster than a CD. But just how fast is the average flash drive? I am going to run a few benchmarks on my flash drive just to check out its performance in read and write speeds, and how many operations per second it can achieve.
In the File System Benchmark the drive performs decently, is an average speed drive compared to some of the fastest drives, which achieve around 16MB/s.
When I ran a file system benchmark on the drive, it achieved an average of 7MB/S. Some of the fastest flash drives achieve around 16MB/s. Physical hard drives have an average of 40MB/s and higher, which is certainly decent considering the typical size of a hard drive. Benchmarks don't always show real world performance. Transferring your data around itself is going to provide the best speed comparison.
The Pros and Cons of flash drives
Pros
- Incredibly small, portable and fast.
- Storage capacity is amazing, considering physical size.
- Data is protected; scratch your drive all you want, as long as it's still in one piece, it should still copy off your information.
- Drives are becoming more and more affordable.
- Unique casing for flash drives can be personalized.
- Some drives offer enhanced security with biometric fingerprint identification.
- Non-volatile storage; if you get it wet, as long as it dries out for a day or two it should still work (but avoid getting it wet at all costs). Your results may vary.
Cons
- Costs more than most recordable media.
- Some flash drives are so small, they can be lost easily.
- Computers with USB 1.1 ports degrade the performance of the drive, but still operate properly.
- CDs are most popular for archival purposes.
Conclusion
After taking a close look at flash drives, it's safe to say that these things certainly can give recordable media a run for the money. They offer awesome performance and are amazingly small. They also offer ease of use and incredible flexibility, which makes them perfect for just about any user who is transferring data around from computer to computer. For archival purposes I'll continue to use recordable media or additional hard drives since they offer cheap mass storage and decent long time reliability.
Id like to thank everyone for reading our article on USB flash drives. They certainly offer an excellent solution for users on the go or users who need to copy data every once in a while. I hope everyone is looking forward to our next article up here on devhardware.
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