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SuperTalent PicoDrive Gold
Testing Continued
Next up is HD Tune, a single-purpose tool for benchmarking drive performance:
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Again, the performance curve starts out low with small files, and ramps up to the promised 30MB/sec on read with files 64MB and larger. Raw read tests were uniformly high across the board. Write speeds were disappointingly low, however, never going above 10MB/sec.
Now we consult Flash Memory Toolkit, a utility collection focused on flash drives:
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Once again, we see blazing fast reads combined with curiously sluggish writes.
Conclusion
As a quick trip to your local electronics store will attest, the USB Flash drive market is saturated with drives in almost every shape, color and configuration imaginable. SuperTalent has achieved the rather difficult task of making a drive that truly stands out. With a gold-plated housing, the tiny Pico-C drive manages to be both convenient and eye-catching, something you cannot often say about computer hardware. The performance is curiously lopsided, however, with blazing-fast reads and curiously pokey writes. The slow write speed hampers the Pico's usefulness as a Sneakernet transport, but the fast reads suggest a role that rewritable DVDs formerly filled: portable system-on-a-drive. Many modern Linux distributions come with tools for installing themselves to a flash drive, and such a device is, in the right hands, often invaluable in emergency system and data recovery scenarios. Having such a system installed on a gold-plated USB drive that fits on your keychain can definitely add to your geek cred.
Therefore, while not perfect, the Pico-C Gold is definitely worth a look for those interested in a USB drive that stands out.
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