Introduction

Flash drives have become commodity products and everyone has at least one. Most people, even those technology challenged folks even have a small stack of these drives tucked into their purses and piled on their desks. For most a thumb drive is a thumb drive and they don't see much of a difference between them. Looking at the flash drive section at the big box stores and it becomes apparent that many manufacturers are willing to let this go on. In many cases we found that performance data wasn't published on the retail packaging, leaving end users to just assume speeds and make their purchases based on price and capacity alone.

Today we are going to take a look at the latest crop of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 flash drives available on the market. This is the first year we have included USB 3.0 products in the round up and we are quite excited to see this new technology rapidly gaining acceptance in the market. The higher costs of USB 3.0 products means USB 2.0 still has some life left in it and with new quad channel designs USB 2.0 in some cases is just as fast as some early USB 3.0 drives.

Let's take a look at how we are testing and then get right into the models being tested today.