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PQI Cool Drive U350H


Author:  Jack Wells
Date:  2008.07.24
Topic:  Storage
Provider:  PQI
Manufacturer:  PQI






PQI Cool Drive U350H

PQI Cool Drive U350H

Testing

Test Rig

Mainboard Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe socket AM2 NVidia nForce 590 SLI ATX
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Windsor 2.0GHz Socket AM2 Dual-Core
RAM 2 GB Kingston Hyper-X DDR2 800 (PC 6400)
Storage Medium 2 Western Digital Raptors in RAID 0
Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate

To get a good idea about this drives performance, I am going to test the PQI Cool Drive U350H against the numbers from Artiom’s review of the Super Talent 8 GB USB Pico drive, which is a current release.  Note, however, that our test systems will differ, but with a USB drive this should be insignificant to the overall numbers.

This test is called Datamarck, spelled exactly like that, and it charts the performance of a storage device over a period of time and also plots the access time. Seen here in blue is the transfer rate of the flash drive, the number at the top in blue represents the peak transfer rate and the blue number at the bottom represents the slowest transfer rate. The large number in the middle is the average transfer rate, for this one it was 28.3 MB/s. Putting this into perspective 25 MB/s is about average and if you look at Artiom’s results you’ll see that only one of his drives could even keep up with this one on the test in terms of transfer speed.

The other line here represents access time, an average access time of 1.5 ms is slightly higher than average (higher acces times are worse), but still very quick. Putting this in perspective is that most 7200 RPM hard drives take around 5 times longer to access a file.

Click to enlarge

PQI Cool Drive U350H

This next test is similar to the one before, it measures sustained data transfer rates. Thus, a larger transfer rate is better. The results on this one agree pretty close with the one before confirming that the results are at least somewhat accurate. The PQI Cool Drive U350H out performed 2 of the 3 drives in Artiom’s testing.

Click to enlarge

PQI Cool Drive U350H

Lastly is a test that measures the transfer speeds of the drive under differing conditions, this test is designed to spot any flaws in the drive by testing it under a lot of different situations it’s likely to encounter. Things to notice are the data segment size (I tested 3 different sizes, 500MB, 100MB, and 50MB) and then the data block sizes. The sizes are important because the smaller blocks (4K) are what it is like to copy over tons of small files whereas Seq, short for sequential means that all of the data is written as a continuous stream. Both these tests, and the one between them, are cases a USB flash drive would have to face in the real world. 

Click to enlarge

PQI Cool Drive U350HPQI Cool Drive U350H

PQI Cool Drive U350H

If you compare these last 3 tests to the tests performed in Artiom’s review of the Super Talent 8GB Pico Drive you’ll see that this drive consistently outperformed 2 of them and fell slightly short of the third one, a pattern is beginning to emerge.

This drive did well on the benchmarks, it held it’s own, but it also failed to pull out in front of other drives and distinguish itself. It was an average performer among current USB drives.

REAL TIME PRICING ON THE PQI COOL DRIVE



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