The tests

The testbench is composed from the ASUS X55SV laptop, the one that I have used for all the Flash Drive tests I have done before and the operating system was Windows 7 x64.
When we insert the flash drive, we can see a green SMD led flashing through the transparent metallic painted top:



The drive comes completely empty, formatted FAT32:



To test the flash drives speeds, I usually use the HD Tune Pro utility, version 4.01. With this flash drive, I had some problems making this program to work. After I have inserted the drive and it was recognized perfectly fine, I wanted to run the HD Tune Pro utility. I have waited for several minutes and nothing was happening. Then I went to check Task Manager and the application was staying there, doing nothing; killing the executable was not possible, neither the “Safely device removal” procedure. I have then tried to restart the computer; windows has locked at the “Logging off…” message and the only thing I could do was to press Reset.

After the computer reboot, I have decided to try again and the application was also staying locked inside Task Manager; when I have removed the flash drive without the safe remove procedure, the program started to run immediately.
I would also like to mention that I’ve got the same HD Tune behavior on two different systems, the laptop with Windows 7 x64 and my Media Center with Windows Xp.

Trying the freeware version of the HD Tune, version 2.55 seemed a good idea, it did not give me any errors at all.



Summary Graph (Read Performance)



To measure the real life performance, I have used the Total Commander application to copy to the flash drive and from the flash drive the same file and recorded the transfer speeds, when they have stabilized.

File Copy



File Read



Summary Graph(Real-life performance)