Yeah, long topic title... but this video has been making its rounds on various gaming sites.
A bit of background information, a few months ago Microsoft decided to enable external and portable hard drives, as well as flash drives, for use in save game, profile, and downloadable content storage.
So this guy, I guess from a gaming blog, decides to run some tests. They're not fair -- the cheapest flash drives he could find versus the most expensive external hard drive he could find.
He then attempts to "install" Borderlands, a 5.3GB disc image file, to each device, and clocks it. (The "install" process makes an image of the disc and stores it; the disc is still needed to authenticate and must remain in the drive while the game is playing, but thereafter loads from the storage device.)
Not surprisingly, the external hard drive has the same speed as the hard drive attached to the Xbox (a laptop hard drive with a SATA connection that is pretty much hard-wired to the Xbox's motherboard). Down to the second, at least.
Even less surprisingly, the SanDisk flash drives get terrible speeds.
What's interesting is that the Xbox throws out a warning, that if you use the hard drive, you may run into some performance issues. Now, I can see it, if you're running a 4200RPM portable, USB-powered drive, maybe that's not gonna perform as well as the hard-wired SATA drive (duh?), but you know that LaCie has at least a 7200RPM drive inside, if not a pair of 'em in RAID.
Even more interestingly, no warnings are given for the badly-performing flash drives. (I own Borderlands, I would clock my 8GB Corsair Flash Voyager, it is set up for Xbox 360 storage, but it's filled with Rockband songs and Arcade games.) I know Microsoft is branding flash drives with SanDisk; maybe the 360 is instructed not to warn on flash media, or specifically SanDisk drives?
If he was willing to drop $300 on that hard drive (what Newegg wants for it), I wish he would have tested the Corsair Flash Voyager GTR (that 128GB, $300 flash drive that claims to be the fastest USB flash drive) against a generic portable hard drive. I mean, I'm quite sure my $50 250GB Seagate portable hard drive outperforms the GTR. It should go without saying. I'm a little faster on the read and a lot faster on the write.
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I am using one of those 16GB Sandsk thumb Drives an have no problems and no regrets after a year but i do like PNY better and I'm thinking i might get one.
Load the App and Play :evil:
For what you pay for a SanDisk or PNY drive at the store though, you can pay for a Corsair, OCZ, or Patriot on Newegg, usually with free shipping. If the mass-market drives work for you, that's cool, but for the same price, you might as well get faster memory in a more hobbyist/enthusiast level flash drive. The Corsair GTR is obviously a luxury item, but a regular Flash Voyager will blow past nearly any store-bought SanDisk or PNY drive of the same capacity (flash memory gets slower with higher capacities) and for being at the same price... yeah. The faster ones should cost a lot more, you'd think... but they don't. Of course, brick & mortar stores also mark up their products a lot; I figure they don't carry the faster drives because they'd charge more, and the general public will generally take the cheaper option.
True
Load the App and Play :evil:
+1
Sandisk is the shittiest stuff I've ever used. I like my card reader, but the flash drives I have are trash. I won't touch them!
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world