Tuesday, July 23, 2013

USB 2.0 Memory Stick Performance – An informal benchmarking

OK, so I’ve been getting more and more disappointed in the performance of the various USB sticks I have lying around.  I tend to use them for transferring photos, videos and ISOs to and from machines that aren’t able to communicate via a common network (and are are too big to just push up to the likes of SkyDrive or Google Drive) or for OS installations (e.g. Win7, Win8 and recently Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Edition).

While read speeds are bearable, the write performance is just abysmal and I’m seriously contemplating investing in a fast USB 3.0 based stick of decent size (64Gig+).

But in the mean time I dropped Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.2 on my HP Pavilion dv6 (INTEL i7 2630QM 2GHz with 8Gig RAM, running Win7SP1 x64) and popped each stick into one of the USB 3.0 ports, to see just how bad the performance really is…

Here’s the various sticks I tested:

IMG_3264

From left to right:

  • A free Windows 7 branded 1gig
  • An EMTEC 8Gig I bought (cheap pack of three)
  • A free IBM branded 2Gig
  • A free Norton Security branded 8Gig (see it does pay to fill out those surveys!)
  • A free Microsoft Branded 16Gig
  • A cheap/generic “DT101 G2” 32Gig (cheapest 32Gig I could find at the time)
  • A SanDisk Cruzer 4Gig
  • A SanDisk Cruzer 8Gig (used to be on my key ring, so it’s a little worse-for-wear)
  • A Toshiba 4Gig
  • A Toshiba 8Gig

And the results are:

Read (MB/s) Write (MB/s)
USB Stick Sequential 512K Random 4K Random 4K Random Queue Depth 32 Sequential 512K Random 4K Random 4K Random Queue Depth 32
Toshiba MK7575GSX SATA 70.63 20.45 0.266 0.4 57.16 21.9 0.576 0.583
BlueWindows 7 1Gig 10.58 10.54 5.612 7.113 2.202 1.334 0.029 0.029
EMTEC 8Gig 19.24 19.65 6.397 7.011 4.739 0.485 0.005 0.004
IBM 2Gig 16.99 16.86 4.441 5.789 2.962 0.547 0.007 0.007
Norton Security 8Gig 29.56 29.28 7.838 10.46 11.34 3 0.06 0.061
Orange Microsoft 16Gig 19.68 18.54 5.121 7.02 4.079 1.182 0.013 0.014
Orange Microsoft 16Gig x64 19.68 19.52 5.158 7.012 4.074 1.184 0.013 0.014
Purple DT101 G2 32Gig 17.45 17.43 5.499 6.022 3.183 0.319 0.003 0.004
SanDisk Cruzer 4Gig 20 20.18 4.063 4.03 4.059 0.717 0.324 0.059
SanDisk Cruzer 8Gig 21.29 21.37 4.551 4.355 3.322 0.43 0.472 0.087
Toshiba 4Gig 25.02 24.91 7.722 8.706 11.97 1.839 0.017 0.018
Toshiba 8Gig 24.95 24.88 7.497 8.56 5.789 0.906 0.008 0.008

While the Toshiba sticks put in a good showing, the Norton Security branded stick comes out top or 2nd in nearly every test. Quite remarkable for a free memory stick.

Still, I think I’ll be on the hunt for for something a bit more performent and bigger…

No comments: