Super Talent Pico-C 8Gb Micro USB Stick Review

Storage/Other by jmke @ 2008-07-04

A 6 gram USB drive not much larger than a fingernail, with room for up to 8Gb of data. Super*Talent has designed a stylish device which claims up to 30Mb/s read speed. Let see what it is made of.

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Performance

Test Setup and Comparison Material

The Pico-C sticks was compared to:
  • Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 4gb
  • Sandisk Cruzer Mini 512Mb
  • Kingston DataTraveler HyperX 4GB
  • Sandisk U3 Contour 4Gb
  • Sandisk U3 Cruzer Micro 4Gb
  • Corsair Voyager 4Gb
  • Corsair Voyager GT 16Gb
  • OCZ Rally2 32Gb
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

    Let’s start with the HDTach’s random access time test:

    Madshrimps (c)


    Access times are lower than current generation hard drives, but compared to the other new USB sticks the drive is lagging behind.

    Madshrimps (c)


    The HDTach read speed test shows impressive numbers for the small Pico drive, at ~30Mb/s it matches what was claimed by Super*Talent and it’s on par with much larger USB drives.

    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 8912Kbsetting.

    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 USB sticks did in the READ test:

    Madshrimps (c)


    Very impressive read numbers here, the Pico-C comes in 2nd, only a hair length behind the Corsair Voyager. The read speed at smaller file chunks is quite remarkable.

    Madshrimps (c)


    Super*Talent warned us that write speeds were nothing too special, this test places the Pico in the middle of the pack at ~12Mb/s write speed. It would take a little bit more than 20 minutes to completely fill the drive.
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