Tom's Hardware Checks Out USB 3.0 Flash Drives

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-3.0-flash-drive-superspeed,2691.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...speed,2691.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Imagine if you were in a real-life role similar to Daniel Zavitz in the film Enemy of the State. You&rsquo;re locked in your apartment when you realize you have to transfer a huge video file quickly before leaving. Bad guys will be busting your door down any second. If your options were based on modern USB 3.0 solutions, which drive would you grab?"</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1280425124.usr20447.jpg" style="border: 0px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>Flash drives were a great idea.&nbsp; When they first arrived, USB ports were already becoming common place and storage needs for transporting files were exceeding what the ancient Floppy drive could support.&nbsp; There were some alternatives, the most common being CD-Rs and CD-RWs, however, the process in using them was complex and annoying.&nbsp; I believe that flash drives really took off when USB 2.0 was widely adopted.&nbsp; Using older USB 1.1 ports, transferring files was still agonizingly slow.&nbsp; With USB 2.0, files moved at a cheerful rate.&nbsp; With larger files though, this no longer seems to be the case.&nbsp; USB 3.0 seems to be the solution, but have you seen the size of some of those drives?&nbsp; USB flash drives are handy because they are portable, and by "portable," I mean "fit-on-your-keychain-and-not-have-to-worry-about-it-stuffing-your-pocket" portable.&nbsp; Some of these look like they pack hard drives in them.&nbsp; I guess it will be a few more months, maybe years, before we see everyone using USB 3.0 flash drives, unless some of you out there need that extra speed more than pocket space.</p>

[Jason Dunn]

Just like USB 2.0, it will take time for USB 3.0 to make its way out there - and it seems to be especially slow, since several brand new computers (Mac Mini, Dell XPS 7100, Lenovo A70z) don't have USB 3.0 yet. USB 2.0 is fast enough for most things, and although I haven't done any benchmarking yet myself, I have a hunch that unless you're using an SSD or mega fast flash drive, moving from 2.0 to 3.0 won't do anything for the speeds of your average external hard drive transfer. The bottleneck is the hard drive...

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Write speeds of most flash drives don't even come close to full USB 2.0 speeds, so...

[Hooch Tan]

For flash based drives, I tend to agree. For hard drive based external drives, I have seen a difference between connecting via USB 2.0 and eSata at the very least. I've also seen significant difference between different USB 2.0 external drives. I imagine that the electronics they use make a lot of difference. I think that flash drives could also benefit if they are made better, but as Tom's Hardware points out, manufacturers seem to be having difficulties doing so, at least on some sort of cost effective scale.

[Jason Dunn]

For flash based drives, I tend to agree. For hard drive based external drives, I have seen a difference between connecting via USB 2.0 and eSata at the very least.

Yes, you're right - eSATA is definitely a speed boost. But I'm not convinced USB 3.0 speeds will be better than eSATA speeds. I'm going to be upgrading my workstation to an AMD-based system with a motherboard that supports USB 3.0, so when I do, I'll perform some benchmarking.

[Hooch Tan]

Yes, you're right - eSATA is definitely a speed boost. But I'm not convinced USB 3.0 speeds will be better than eSATA speeds. I'm going to be upgrading my workstation to an AMD-based system with a motherboard that supports USB 3.0, so when I do, I'll perform some benchmarking.

Short of RAID-0 type configurations, I do agree that USB 3.0 will exceed eSATA speeds, but that still would be a welcome boost. Also, hard drive, SSD and even Flash media speeds can increase and have been over time, so perhaps several years down the road, we'll realize better transfer times. While I don't find myself often having to copy or transport multi-gigabyte data, every so often, when I do, I find myself wanting!