Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• OCZ Rally 1GB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1 GB
• OCZ Roadster 1 GB
• Super Talent RBST 1 GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
• Verbatim Store'n'Go Pro 2 GB
• SuperTalent RBST 1 GB
• A-Data MyFlash PD7 1 GB
• A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

We used HDTach in the following two benchmarks.


The drive scores just under 20MB/s in the read benchmark. This is a good result, with only three drives topping the PD16. The speed should suffice for even larger files.


The A-DATA PD16 shines when it comes to access times. The company advertises the use for ReadyBoost and it will certainly work well with access times below 1ms.


Like with all drives, performance gets better, the bigger the data chunks are. Also common to all USB sticks is that writes are slower than reads. Optimum file size is 64KB or bigger for maximum performance. In daily use you will almost never see files smaller than 64KB. Unfortunately the write performance is extremely low when using smaller chunk sizes, so this drive is best used with bigger files.