Fast Pendrive

I use a Sony 8GB flash USB pendrive and it works fine. I have been looking to find a faster one, but have not finished my search. I have another pendrive but it is one of those cheap ones they give you as "goodies" and don't know the brand, but it also works fine. I would say your problem may be that your PC has a USB 1.0 or 1.1 port instead of a USB 2.0. May be your pendrive runs only at USB 1.x speed.

In my search, I have seen the Corsair Flash Voyager GT and the Super Talent HD series. Both at http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1126/print/

I noticed they mention HD Tach as a benchmark application to test hardrive and flash memory. I downloaded it from http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,69656/description.html and tested my pendrives with it. Here are the results together with a Western Digital 10000rpm RAID hardrive:

                                       Pendrive   Pendrive  Hard Drive  
                                       SONY 8GB   Cheap     Raptor WD74
Random Acccess Time (lower is better): 0.8ms      51.4ms    n/a
CPU Use (lower is better):             12.0%      50.0%     n/a
Average Read rate (higher is better):  18.2MB/s   12.9MB/s  65.0MB/s

So, aparently, my SONY is not a bad guy. I got it for little less than $30.