Test Setup and Comparison Material

The Kingston DT HyperX USB stick was compared to:

• Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 4gb (photo)
  
• Sandisk Cruzer Mini 512Mb (photo)

The following test setup was used with Windows XP SP2 installed; we used ATTO HDD Benchmark v2.34 and HDTach 3.0 to measure performance:

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	XFX Geforce 8800 GTX Coolermaster Real Power M520 520W PSU 2x Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD

Performance



HDTach shows very noticeable lower access time for the Kingston DT HyperX USB stick, the older Sandisk comes close to 10ms.



Burst and Average read speed in HDTach is on par with the claims made by Kingston, the drive easily surpasses 30Mb/s. Up to 3 times better than the older competition.

ATTO HDD Benchmark allows you to test the performance of a storage media by measuring the time it takes to read or write a file of 256Mb; the difference with other HDD benchmark is that ATTO will read/write that data file in different size chunks, going from 0.5Kb to 8192Kb. In our test we used 4kb to 8912Kb setting.

The smaller transfer sizes are applicable for overall Windows operation like Page File actions (~4kb) and small file transfers (.inf , .ini, .dll files). Larger 100Mb+ files are transferred in much larger chunks. Normally you can expect that hard drives do rather well with small chunks, better than SSD in any case, once the file transfer size increases performance will go up for SSD/HDD and USB sticks.

If you want to run an applications straight of your USB stick, high performance at small transfer size is important. If you plan to use it primarily to transfer large files, file transfer speed at chunks of 512Kb are more important.

Let’s see how these three USB sticks did in the READ test:


At around 64Kb file chunks the performance for all USB sticks flattens out and reflects the performance numbers seen by HDTach Read test. At smaller file transfer chunks the performance drops quickly and the new Kingston DT HyperX barely manages to stay in the lead at 4Kb.



The write test reflects the read test in that aspect that at 64Kb the performance line flattens for all the contestants, it is at the lower size chunks that a difference can be seen. The old Sandisk Cruzer Mini comes out on top here with quite a margin. The Kingston sticks don’t handle write operations very well at lower file chunks and at ~500Kb/s at 4Kb can be called very slow.