What specs should I check for portable apps?

[BeanBagKing]

I use my flash drive a lot at work and school where I don't have administrator rights to install my own programs. In the past I've used fairly small drives (currently an 8 gb one) as the transfer speeds tend to be faster. However, these start to fill up fairly quick as I load them up with everything else. These days 32 gb models are really affordable, but I'm not sure how well they'd be able to run portable apps, I'm not even sure what benchmark I should be looking for.

Does anyone know more about portable apps on flash drives? Should I be worried more about read speed or write speed? Or does it even matter if they are just loaded into the desktop memory? Should I look at the transfer speed of large files or small files?

I would like one that performs well with regular files as well of course, I've been looking at some benchmarks on this site http://usbflashspeed.com, should I really be worried about 16kb and smaller files these days, or just look at the max numbers?

Also, I've seen/used a few different benchmark tools, they all seem to report results different ways (average of read times, slowest time, different file sizes used to test transfer times, etc). I'd appreciate hearing what tool/method you think is best and why so I can properly compare what I'm looking at to what you might think is a reasonable speed.

I would like to get a Cruzer Fit just for it's size and price. My drive goes everywhere with me on my keychain, so large bulky models are just annoying, but again, I'm worried about the speed.

I'm mostly looking for information on what I need to look for, but if you have a particular drive that you really think I should stay away from, or one you've really loved, feel free to add it and I'll keep that one in mind.

Edit: Most computers I use these portable apps on don't have USB3, and I don't see an upgrade coming anytime soon. Just wanted to add that I'm looking at all these benchmarks from a USB2 perspective and that I'm not particular about the drive being 3 compliment.

 

[popatim]

the nice thing about usb3 drives is that they are backwards compatible with usb2 they just dont run at usb3 speeds. This still leaves you (typically) with a fast usb2 drive.

My thoughts on your situation is get the fastest most reliable drive you can afford. Anything faster than you current drive can only be a win! As for file size, look at the apps you already use.
I dont know why your school hasn't locked out the usb ports though... thats stupid of them but a nice plus for you.

 

[BeanBagKing]

While I completely agree with your point (get the fastest drive I can), that's exactly what my question revolved around, how do I measure what's going to be fastest for my needs?

For example, the Cruizer Fit I'm looking at now shows a max read speed of about 21 mb/s, whereas my current x-mini has a max read speed of 18 or so. However, when we look at the minimum write speed, mine clearly outclasses the Fit, writing small files at 1.66 mb/s vs 0.33. I could pick any other area to compare, or use some other benchmark and probably come up with different numbers.

So should I be looking at that large file read speed, or that small file write speed? or should I be looking at large file write speeds? Or should I just be averaging everything together?

When it comes to size, am I looking at the size of the entire app? Does it really read/write all 724 mb of netbeans portable every time I open it? or just the .exe which is 224 kb. I'm guessing that the read speed is more important than the write speed for portable apps, but to be honest I really have no idea. I imagine my portable version of chrome is constantly writing small cookie files. Or maybe it just loads chrome into the desktops ram and writes everything there?

This is what I'm trying to get to, not just an answer of "faster is better", which really doesn't help. I'm hoping someone can get into the technical details of what exactly would be best and why.

If it helps at all, some of the apps I use sorted by frequency...
Chrome
Notepad++
NetBeans
Spybot
Filezilla
7-zip

I also open quite a few large pdf's on it.

As for the other stuff, just to keep the convos going:

School uses some variant of deep freeze, everything gets wiped every time someone logs on or off, and accounts are tied to each person, so they don't stay logged on for longer than a class period. I'm sure someone could still figure out how to do damage with a USB drive, but the pros (and downright necessities) of being able to save work somewhere without it being wiped outweigh the risks. There are some guest computers that has USB/CD/etc locked down tight, but that's pretty impractical for class use.

As for USB3, yea, I know they are backwards compatible, so it wouldn't be bad to have one I can use with the next set of hardware. My point was more that for my purposes there's really no use taking that into account. I figured it wouldn't be long before someone pointed out some really nice specs on some drive or another where the benchmark was ran on a USB3 port, which wouldn't help me at all, I wanted to get that out of the way in the beginning.