SUMMARY: Pen drives, pocket drives, Flash sticks, thumb drives... we’ve heard many different names for this type product but it all boils down to one thing; convenient storage. Mike has checked in with a look at the VisionTek Xtreme2 1GB USB GO Drive today. It offers impressive USB 2.0 performance over other similar drivers. How impressive? Read on and find out!
When it comes to testing out a small drive like this, our main concerns are going to be the ability to read and write data. Since this is designed to be used as a means to carry data from one machine to another, it would be nice to know that it can do these functions at a reasonable pace.
To test out the drive, I will use HD Tach from Simpli Software. Since this utility has the ability to perform both read and write tests, it suits our needs perfectly. The test system is an overclocked Athlon XP 2400+ and the ports used are all USB 2.0 capable.
The top results are for the VisionTek model being tested and the bottom results are from an X-Micro 128MB drive. Considering that both devices are USB 2.0 compliant and both were tested at USB 2.0 standards, I was more than a little surprised to see such a large gap in the numbers. The math works out to the VisionTek being 57% faster in reading data and a whopping 148% faster in writing!
Neither drive forced the CPU to work and both offered access times of under 1ms, but this isn’t too surprising considering the relatively small data areas they are working with. Given the results shown above, we seem to have a clear cut winner on our hands.
