Fastest USB Drive

When it comes to optimal PortableApp performance whats the recommended filesystem and cluster size?

Ive been using FAT32 with the standard cluster size.

The only problem is that you CAN NOT go by the straight read and write speeds when you're talking about portable app performance. -- John T. Haller

John is absolutely right. I have had about a dozen different drives including the OCZ 2 Gb, the Corsair Flash Voyager 4 Gb and the Sandisk U3 Titanium 2 Gb and I have sold or returned all except the Sandisk Cruzer Titanium (and not because of the U3 - he he).

For a while, I read all the forums (including the comparison noted below and the comparisons on Tom's Hardware) to find the fastest drive. As a consequence, I bought the Corsair. Tested on HDSpeed (small portable app to test read and write speeds) and found blazing speeds. I then set out to create a truecrypt archive of 2 Gb on it. It kept on losing power 1/2 way though the operation and I would have to reformat the drive. I did this a dozen times. I then simply tried to copy a 1.4 Gb XviD over -- it started very fast, but did not finish...reformat. In short, fast, but unreliable in my limited experience...so useless. Maybe it was just a problem with that particular drive? Don't know, don't care. I returned it.

Next purchase was an OCZ 2 Gb stick. Tested on HDSpeed and found very very fast reads and writes, but only on files larger than 5 Mb. On smaller files, it was a snail on both read and mostly write speeds. I thought the tests were flukes so I kept the drive for about 6 months since I like the slim size and the black aluminium. I ended up selling the drive because unless you are only moving movies and mp3's around, the snail write speed on small files (1k, 16k, etc.) really bogs you down. This is especially true for portable apps since you are constantly reading and writting little exe's, dll's, ini's, etc.

Last purchase and current drive is a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2 Gb. When I tested it out on HDSpeed, it was craking out 15 Mb going down to 10 Mb for smaller files with write speeds slightly slower. Needless to say, I was disappointed with the speed and nearly ended up returning this one too since the OCZ was already at more than 20 Mb read and pretty close to that on write speeds for larger files. Because I really liked the size, ergonomics and the slider (instead of a cap), I tried one last series of test...real world tests versus the OCZ.

I copied a 1.4 Gb move HD to and from OCZ and same movie HD Titanium. Difference in time was less than 10 seconds with OCZ being faster -- wierd, I would have thought that the difference would have been much more. Tried again with 500 Mb of MP3's of between 8 Mb and 2 Mb. On read test, both were neck and neck. On writes, the TITANIUM was faster by 30 seconds. Very wierd. I ended the test with copying 11 Mb of fonts (very small files). OCZ was left in the dust. I did the tests two or three times and got roughly the same results (don't quote me on the exact difference to the second).

So the conclusion is that published/measured drive speed is not that important in everyday life. It's like the gigahertz battle between Intel and AMD -- who is faster? Who cares, get more RAM and a faster HD and you'll see more results than changing processor speed.

I kept the Titanium because of "overall" better performance. It is definitely slower than the Corsair and OCZ in speed tests, but in everyday life, it is practically just as fast (if not faster), is much more convenient (no cap) and looks much more professional than the black and blue Corsair Flash Eraser.

Now, if I could only get a Sandisk 16 Gb Cruzer Titanium (notice I did not mention U3) for less than $100...

My 2 cents. Sorry for the long post. Hope this helps.

Small, external hard disks are much faster than USB pen drives. The downside to the hard drives is that then tend to be bigger and more bulky (compared to pen drives) and they tend to be more fragile due to moving parts (platter spinning at 7200 rpm).

-IP