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
• Super DH Series 200x 1 GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 GB
• Verbatim Store'n'Go Pro 2 GB
• A-Data MyFlash PD7 1 GB
• A-Data Football Disk 512 MB
• A-Data PD17 Flash Drive 1 GB
• A-Data RB19 Flash Drive 1 GB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

The A-DATA PD17 performs quite well, considering the size. It delivers a solid 18.2 MB/s read speed. Considering the incredibly small size, it is great to see such good performance, well inside the bunch of drives we have tested so far.


The A-DATA PD17 shines when it comes to access times. The company advertises the use for ReadyBoost and with 0.7ms it will certainly work well with access times below 1ms. This is great for such a small device.


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 and not constant at all when using smaller chunk sizes, so this drive is best used with bigger files. Write speeds are just under 6 MB/s while ATTO confirms the read performance result of HD Tach.