Nine USB 3.0 Flash Drives For Road Warriors
The best ultra-portable USB 3.0 storage products from 16 to 128 GB square off in a grand comparison. We found wildly disparate transfer rates ranging from 200 MB/s down to a snail’s pace. At the end, though, two products rose to the top of our list.
Super Talent ExpressDrive (32 GB)
The performance of Super Talent's black ExpressDrive didn’t attract a lot of attention either in the practical benchmark testing, where we read and wrote 2 GB of data in different file sizes, or in the I/O benchmarks. It did, however, hold its own in the combined reading and writing tests. In the sequential operation test we measured up to 84 MB/s for reads and 45-28 MB/s for writes. On its Web site, Super Talent claims results of nearly 130 MB/s, which are based on benchmarking tools that assume that 1 KB equals 1000 bytes instead of 1024 bytes. This explains a part of the difference.
Super Talent offers a proprietary driver with the ExpressDrive, claiming it improves performance, as was indeed the case in most benchmarks. In some cases, we saw a decline in performance, but it was so slight as to be negligible. The interface bandwidth, which expresses maximum potential performance, even increased from 84.8 to 127.1 MB/s. That's much closer to Super Talent's spec for this drive. All in all, however, the difference in sequential reading and writing enabled by the proprietary driver is hardly noticeable in practice.
To the ExpressDrive's credit, it is not too expensive. We found the 32 GB model for $120, which is acceptable. Last but not least, Super Talent offers a comforting five-year warranty for this drive.
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