Date: July 6th, 2010
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Super Talent
<--CLICK FOR PRICES ON A USB 3.0 FLASH DRIVE THE UNITED STATES
<--CLICK FOR PRICES ON A USB 3.0 FLASH DRIVE IN CANADA
PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING

When the drive is plugged in, you are greeted with the built-in FNet TurboHDD software. It provides some basic information about the drive and also gives you the choice of enabling “ Normal ” or Turbo” mode. Turbo mode claims to provide a performance boost of up to 25%.

For testing, the flash drive was attached to a USB 3.0 port and a DVD image file (.iso) was copied to it from my test PC running Windows XP SP3. Transfer times were recorded, and the process was repeated with the drive attached to a USB 2.0 port. Turbo mode was enabled during testing.
Before beginning, I transferred the image file between two SATA drives in my test PC. It took 1 minute, 37 seconds. Let's see how that compares to Super Talent's Express Drive .
First, here are the results using USB 2.0:
4.35GB File Transfer (USB 2.0)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to flash drive |
2:46 |
Read from flash drive |
2:21 |
And now here are the results using USB 3.0:
4.35GB File Transfer (USB 3.0)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to flash drive |
1:22 |
Read from flash drive |
1:11 |
As the results show, USB 3.0 demonstrates an incredible performance increase over its predecessor. The theoretical transfer rate for USB 3.0 is 4.8Gbps (versus 480Mbps for USB 2.0), and while it's unlikely we'll ever see that kind of speed in the real world, it's still a noticeable improvement. Enabling Turbo mode in the software did improve both read and write transfers by a few seconds when using both USB 2.0 and 3.0.
|