USB Thumb Drive Vs. Hard Drive

Results: Transfer Diagrams

The transfer diagram of our IBM hard drive illustrates the characteristic step pattern that you will find on a majority of modern hard drives. However, most of the hard drives that are available today deliver similar read and write throughput, which isn’t the case for this older unit. Of course, 12 MB/s maximum read throughput seems pathetic today, as hard drives such as the Samsung Spinpoint F1 max out at roughly 120 MB/s. That’s 10x the performance at 100x the capacity.

Super Talent Pico C 8 GB

The Super Talent Pico C drive sticks to the promises on its manufacturer’s website: the tiny drive actually delivers around 30 MB/s and typically stays well above 25 MB/s. Write performance averages at 12 MB/s and is still faster than what you’d get from the 10 GB IBM DTTA hard drive. But that’s only one part of the story; I/O performance tells another one.