Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• OCZ Rally 1 GB
• 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 PD18 Flash Drive 2 GB
• A-Data RB19 Flash Drive 1 GB
• A-Data Pirates Flash Drive 2 GB
• PQI Intelligent Drive i810 1 GB
• PQI Travelling Disk i221 1 GB
• Thermaltake MUSE external HDD enclosure
• Generic Stick USB 1.1 256 MB

The A-DATA PD18 performs very well, considering the size. It delivers an excellent 30.2 MB/s read speed. Considering the incredibly small size, it is great to see such good performance, well above most of the bunch of drives we have tested so far.


The A-DATA PD18 lacks in access times with a mere 12.7 ms. Even so, it is certified for Vista ReadyBoost and I actually tried it out in Vista Ultimate, where it worked like a charm. Users who have 512MB of memory should see some performance benefit when using the A-DATA PD18 as a ReadyBoost drive.


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 around 7.5 MB/s while ATTO confirms the read performance result of HD Tach.