Performance

We used the following devices for our comparison:

• OCZ Rally 1GB
• OCZ Mini Kart 1GB
• Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB
• Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 MB
• Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2 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 transfer rate of about 17 MB/s can be considered fast, but not super fast. For ReadyBoost, transfer rate is only of secondary interest. It is much more important to have low access times and this is where the RBST can shine.


An access time of only 0.9 ms on average is about as fast as it gets. Compared to some other drives, access time is almost 100 times faster and this is what matters for Vista ReadyBoost.

To get a feeling how the speed with different sized files is, we used the ATTO disk benchmark.


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.