USB Flash Drive Roundup - 10/2005
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 4, 2005 11:28 AM EST- Posted in
- Memory
Impact of File System on USB Flash Drives
Although these days, most Windows XP hard drives are formatted as NTFS by default, there was a time when you had to choose what file system you wanted to use for your Windows PC: FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS. The move to very large hard drives pretty much killed off FAT16, but given that the largest USB flash drives weigh in at 4GB, and the majority are 2GB and smaller, the FAT16 file system has been given a new lease on life.
If you have a USB flash drive larger than 2GB, FAT16 is not an option, but given that most of the drives that we're looking at here today are only 512MB in size, FAT16 was just as viable as the other options in Windows.
Every single drive that we tested came pre-formatted with a FAT16 partition, and to understand why, you needn't look any further than a quick performance comparison between FAT16 and FAT32 on USB flash drives.
The graph below plots the average read performance advantage of FAT16 over FAT32 in KB/s as a function of file size for 19 USB flash drives; obviously, higher numbers are better:
The performance benefits are even greater when we look at write performance:
Note that not all drives exhibit such a preference for FAT16 over FAT32. The following table gives you a better idea of what drives benefit and which ones don't:
As you can see, those averages that we reported earlier are really dominated by a handful of drives that benefit tremendously from FAT16, such as the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium, Lexar JumpDrive Lightning and Crucial Gizmo!. Other drives actually drop in write performance such as the Kingston DataTraveler II+ migo.
Given that the average performance impact of FAT16 for these drives still ends up being positive, we chose to test all of them in FAT16. Although, keep in mind that some of these drives may exhibit better performance when formatted with FAT32.
Although these days, most Windows XP hard drives are formatted as NTFS by default, there was a time when you had to choose what file system you wanted to use for your Windows PC: FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS. The move to very large hard drives pretty much killed off FAT16, but given that the largest USB flash drives weigh in at 4GB, and the majority are 2GB and smaller, the FAT16 file system has been given a new lease on life.
If you have a USB flash drive larger than 2GB, FAT16 is not an option, but given that most of the drives that we're looking at here today are only 512MB in size, FAT16 was just as viable as the other options in Windows.
Every single drive that we tested came pre-formatted with a FAT16 partition, and to understand why, you needn't look any further than a quick performance comparison between FAT16 and FAT32 on USB flash drives.
The graph below plots the average read performance advantage of FAT16 over FAT32 in KB/s as a function of file size for 19 USB flash drives; obviously, higher numbers are better:
The performance benefits are even greater when we look at write performance:
Note that not all drives exhibit such a preference for FAT16 over FAT32. The following table gives you a better idea of what drives benefit and which ones don't:
| FAT16 Performance Impact | AVG Read Increase | AVG Write Increase |
| Corsair Flash Voyager | 4.5% | 10.4% |
| Crucial Gizmo! | 1.8% | 146.5% |
| Kingston DataTraveler | -0.5% | -3.8% |
| Kingston DataTraveler Elite | 2.2% | 6.5% |
| Kingston DataTraveler II | 2.0% | 0.2% |
| Kingston DataTraveler II Plus migo | 6.2% | -38.8% |
| Lexar JumpDrive Lightning | 7.8% | 605.5% |
| Memina Rocket | 9.6% | 7.4% |
| OCZ Rally | 10.6% | 31.2% |
| PQI I-Stick 2.0 | 0.1% | 16.4% |
| PQI I-Stick 2.0 Plus | 1.7% | 12.2% |
| PQI I-Stick Pro170 | 4.7% | 16.0% |
| SanDisk Cruzer Micro | 2.0% | -9.1% |
| SanDisk Cruzer Mini | 4.1% | -5.1% |
| SanDisk Cruzer Titanium | 2.2% | 576.0% |
| SanDisk Ultra II Plus USB | 4.1% | -18.9% |
| Shikatronics | -0.3% | 14.1% |
| Transcend JetFlash | 3.8% | -20.1% |
| Transcend JetFlash 110 | -0.4% | 8.6% |
As you can see, those averages that we reported earlier are really dominated by a handful of drives that benefit tremendously from FAT16, such as the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium, Lexar JumpDrive Lightning and Crucial Gizmo!. Other drives actually drop in write performance such as the Kingston DataTraveler II+ migo.
Given that the average performance impact of FAT16 for these drives still ends up being positive, we chose to test all of them in FAT16. Although, keep in mind that some of these drives may exhibit better performance when formatted with FAT32.
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sprockkets - Thursday, October 6, 2005 - link
Although not reviewed here, I got the A Data key from newegg.com simply because they say it works with Linux on the package. I know any key will, but they are the only ones to have the guts to say it. Thanks for admitting Linux exists. Lifetime warranty too.jgh - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
here is a link for another link, to an app that can make many (but probably not all) usb drives bootable and a couple of other hints/tips.http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5735">link
O.T. - for some reason i get a message that says i do not have permission to access this forum when i tried to create a new login with my e-mail address. did i get banned or something? i have only posted once (it was about the gta:lcs website). i also cannot log in with the origianl user name and password.
p.s. - it is o.k. to post links like this right?
Toolsac - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
I just wanna say thanks to anand for bring us all so much info on every nook and crany of computing. When ever I am getting ready to upgrade or have a problem with my computer, Anand can help me. THANKS GUYS YOU ROCK!!!GameManK - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
also curious about the memorex drives like the m-flyerhoppa - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
Cool article, and a nice summary of the market (the intro stuff), but seriously, who really cares that much about the perfomance of these things when the entire thing can be written or read in <1 minute anyway. I do love benchmarks though (born and will die a stat-whore)!I have a suggestion for the article: can you post a single picture of all the drives (preferably with a key). I'd like to see what they all look like but I wasn't too crazy at all about clicking through 20 pages. In fact, I only made it through 4.
-andy
vexingv - Friday, October 21, 2005 - link
its an iomega 256mb and claims to be usb2, but is ridiculously slow compared to a generic 64mb drive i have. i've tried transferring about 20mb worth of portable firefox on the two drives side-by-side and the iomega drive took close to 5 minutes while my other drive took less than a minute.these benchmarks are really useful for that purpose of finding drives w/ faster flash memory controllers.
Souka - Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - link
REad the article....less than 1 min? Read it....not happening.Write times had the biggest delta....upto 20x speed difference....
So would you rather watch your drive write data for 3.5mins, or almost an hour?
Far as "clicking through 20 pages" Click once on the "Print this Article"....then you just use page down(or equivalent button) to scroll through
Chriz - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
This was a good roundup, but I was also curious on some other drives that can be found on Newegg. Mainly interested in the Apacer drives and also the Memorex M-flyer...which got a good review in Maximum PC because of the retractable USB connector which seems convenient to me, but I am really not sure on the performance compared to other drives.intellon - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
And why was iPod Shuffle excluded? Is it cuz of security matter/ bigger size/ higher cost? Cuz I use half of my shuffle for transfering files to and from - work, home and school.jkostans - Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - link
Because its an mp3 player. There are plenty of ipod shuffle type players out there which aren't included, some smaller and more compact. I'm sure they would be with the slowest of the slow.