USB Flash Drives

[Pat]

First, I am not referring to memory sticks or those flash cards used in
cameras. Sandisk, Lexar, and over a dozen manufacturers make USB 2.0 Flash
Drives that go from 128 MB up to 2 GB in size. They have transfer rates like
some hard drives.

(1) How many times can you re-write over the data on these thumb sized
devices?

(2) What governs the wide range of transfer rates?

I'm leaning toward the Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB.

 

[CWatters]

I'm leaning toward the Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB.

I have a Sandisk Mini 128MByte drive on a USB 2 port provided by a PCI card.

I've just ran an old copy of SiSoft Sandra on it. Thought you might
interested in the results

Buffered Read 8 MB/s
Sequential Read 8 MB/s
Random Read 5 MB/s
Buffered Write 1670 kB/s
Sequential Write 1730 kB/s
Random Write 462 kB/s
Average Access Time 5 ms (estimated)

The same data for my internal WD 100G C:

Buffered Read 84 MB/s
Sequential Read 21 MB/s
Random Read 4 MB/s
Buffered Write 75 MB/s
Sequential Write 27 MB/s
Random Write 6 MB/s
Average Access Time 11 mS (estimated)

Quite a difference.

 

[Arno Wagner]

First, I am not referring to memory sticks or those flash cards used in
cameras. Sandisk, Lexar, and over a dozen manufacturers make USB 2.0 Flash
Drives that go from 128 MB up to 2 GB in size. They have transfer rates like
some hard drives.

(1) How many times can you re-write over the data on these thumb sized
devices?

Depends. Look into the spec. You can get devices with as
low as 10.000 overwrites and as high as 1.000.000.
If the manufacturer does not say, assume the worst.

Arno

 

[dan]

I have the Cruzer Titanium and I'm very happy with it. In addition to
being a great tool, the metal casing protects it well. I know a bunch
of people with the plastic ones with bent or broken off tips. It's
also pretty small by comparison to most every other one on the market,
with the exception of the Cruzer Mini (which are plastic and prone to
getting smushed)

to your questions: there doesn't seem to be a practical limit to the
number of rewrites you can do. Sandisk doesn't make a note of it
anywhere in their literature.

The biggest factor in the transfer rate is USB 1.1 vs 2. Next you get
into the design of the devices, the performance and quality of the
flash memory, and the quality of the manufacturing process used by the
company. Usually this means that the faster drives will cost a little
more.

Dan