Zardon

Read The Review Here
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USB flash drives are perhaps the most convenient mobile storage solution one can get. They are small and require nothing more than a free USB port on any computer running a modern OS. The recent price drops due to the high supply and popularity of flash RAM made high capacity USB drives even more attractive to technology enthusiasts who like to have a few GBs of storage with them wherever they go. When a reputable memory manufacturer gets involved access speeds tend to skyrocket while the drives get smaller and smaller. In this case, the speeds are lightning fast, as the SuperTalent DG series 4GB flash drive boasts with a 200x top rated speed (over 30MB/s). With such a high rating this is theoretically one of the fastest drives available today.

Erroneus

It would have been nice with a test of it's access times.

Also you are missing a direct comparision with the Corsair Voyager GT in the "sandra tests"

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Grace

Seek and access times are not applicable for flash drives. They are always below 1ms, no software can reliably measure that and they make no difference when comparing drives when they are so low.


I'm not missing anything, I just cannot add one picture on top of another; people would get confused. I like to take screenshots rather than just drawing a table and type the results in. That was the review of the SuperTalent DG series drive anyway. The review of the Corsair Voyager GT is there for everyone to read and only a couple of weeks old, clicking on the 'reviews' button can't be that hard for anybody who wants to double-check the results.


I have at least a few more USB drives here for review; if I were to add the results of every drive I ever reviewed, or even links to older reviews of similar drives, after a year or so the USB drive reviews won't be reviews at all; they will be 60-way round-ups!

Erroneus

Thats not correct, I've seen a lot of times where accesstimes are over 1ms and accesstimes are important, if you are using your flash drive for eg. Vista Readyboost.

Well I have to say, I completely disagree with you there. So you want the readers to go through all the other reviews and compare numbers thats way by noting down numbers from 4-5 pages to eg. a notepad, instead of you inserting a graph with the most relevant drives. Thats just plain stupid dude...

Look how simple and easy it can be done: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A..._Flash_Drive/3

Normally DH reviews are top-notch, but this time the quality are lacking.

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Grace

Thank you for the kind comments.

As I said, no *software* can reliably test access times of flash drives; they are apparrently too fast. We are talking about >1ms, that's 0.001s, which is almost as fast as the speed of the access signal itself. Flash drives tend to react almost immediately (and I said almost because there is no such thing as 'immediatelly') to the access signal. The rest are up to the storage controller, chipset and the rest of the components involved. Even the cable length can easily affect that. If I test the drive on my laptop and then my PC, the access times will be entirely different. And using a software designed to test the performance of mechanical drives to test a solid state drive is out of question for me. Basic things.

So, each user looking to read for the info he/she wants to is stupid, but linking to like 10 previous reviews isn't, which would turn each individual review to a round-up. Well, maybe I'm not all that clever since I could write one review with every flash drive I received every 2-3 months instread of one every week. As I said, I like to insert screenshots. It limits the 'fraud' part, as you can probably imagine it is far easier to forge (deliberately or not) the results when drawing a table than on a screenshot. Which means that either you complain because you are lazy enough not to look at the reviews which are interesting to you, or someone else complains that I don't add screenshots. Also certain tests, like the sandra tests, offer diagrams where you can see the drive speed at different points of time, data sizes and so on. You cannot simply transfer those to a 'homemade' results graph, neither compare drives of different capacities at all sometimes.

You can probably understand (if you actually think about it a bit) that this was a review of the SuperTalent DG drive; not a roundup and comparison to any other drive. If I want to do a round up of 'relevant' drives, I will add them all together in one review. Much less work for me. Unless of course you like them separate but still want to see comparison charts, so you must think that doing 5 separate reviews of relevant products with the same result tables and simply write different comments in each of them does not fall in the 'that's plain stupid dude' category.

Finally, I'm so sorry that I cannot do my reviews the way you like them.

Just a note; the delete performance test of Sandra is a pretty good indication of the seek and access time of flash drives. Also, Sandra offers random access times when the test can actually read anything higher than 1ms. At least that software is designed and tuned to test flash drives and not mechanical drives and still they do not endorse results of >1ms access times. So, what you wanted to see is already there.

This was an interesting debate, but I'm sorry I cannot spend any more time on this.

Erroneus

I was just wondering why eg. techpowerup could measure access-times:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...ges/graph2.gif

Well I still dont agree on the graphs, comparison graphs can be done in so many other reviews. So why not this one or at least comparing it to the second-fastest, by informing what the numbers for the second-fastest drive was. You do state it's the fastest you have tested, but you don't give any numbers to prove it, the user has to check for him self.

But I'm not the one to tell how it should be done, just my opinion and if nothing changes, well I can live with that.

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Zardon

Well I think grace answered your questions in a detailed and polite manner, which is more than I can say for the way your structured your questions to her. You really need to work on structuring your questions to people in a constructive and pleasant manner rather than sounding like your dog just died.

Incidentally there are ways to measure access times on these drives as techpowerup have shown, but the case and point Grace was making is that, the results are actually useless in real world terms (we are talking microseconds), and Driver Heaven is firmly placed on giving real world results to the end user - this is a part of our philosophy of not including apps like 3dmark in graphics card reviews - they are useless. Grace also gave you information on the Sandra testing which you seemed to totally ignore.

Obviously your opinion is important, however I am disappointed with the manner you have addressed your concerns, especially for a high standing gold member.