USB Flash Drive Showdown

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Testing Methodology

We bought these sticks from various online and local stores. No cherry-picked manufacturer's samples here! We used some synthetic benchmarks to help measure the raw performance of the drives, and we also tested the drives with a real-world benchmark: the moka5 LivePC Engine.

Synthetic Benchmarks

We tested the raw performance of each drive using both the ATTO Disk benchmark and HD Tach. These benchmarks measure sequential read/write speed. They are good as a rough indicator but don't always correlate to real-world performance, as you will see from the results.

Real-world Benchmarks

We started by formatting each flash drive and installing the moka5 LivePC Engine on it. We specified a cache size of 50% of the total capacity of the device and enabled continuous backups to the local machine. We did not tweak any USB performance settings. We subscribed to the OO2Go+ LivePC, waited until it said "ready" and clicked to start the LivePC. We waited until the OO2Go+ desktop came up completely, then powered off. We repeated this a few times and took an average of the numbers. The times are reported as wall-clock times from the click time until the desktop toolbar appeared on the screen.

Note that OO2Go+ is one of the largest, most full-featured LivePCs and therefore it really stresses the storage layer. Smaller LivePCs like Fearless Browser boot up much faster.

Editor's Rating

We combined the performance, cost, form factor, capacity, and perceived durability into an admittedly subjective "Editor's Rating" ranging from 1 to 5 stars. Real-world performance and cost were the most important metrics.

Machine Specifications

Here are the specifications for the machine we used for testing:

Click on to see the results...