Test Setup and Comparison Material

The SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB stick was compared to:

• Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 4gb (photo)
  
• Sandisk Cruzer Mini 512Mb (photo)
  
• Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 4GB (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 Access Time is very low with the SanDisk Cruzer Micro, 0.6ms is extremely fast!



Read speeds are better than the two older drives but not by much, burst speed is noticeable higher though at 20Mb/s.

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; do note that the average read speed is lower then the burst speed, 6Mb/s lower, which is noticeable when transferring larger files.

At smaller file transfer chunks the performance of the Cruzer Micro is above the other and comes out first.



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 again but closely followed by the new Cruzer Micro. Overall write speed of the Cruzer Micro is not very high compared to the more expensive Kingston DT HyperX.