Some personal Flash Drive Benchmarks

[lawrence131]

I started researching some OS booting from USB to use for emergencies (TinyXP on a thumb drive) in case my OS partition crapped out so I can still use my computer in a limited fashion or access my RAID arrays. Found out there's a huge difference in performance between different flash devices, so here's an ATTO benchmark run on the ones I currently have in case anyone else is interested. This is with performance mode (write-cache) disabled on Windows 7 64-bit RC to keep it consistent. Also tested with FAT32 and NTFS and the results are within 10%.

Kingston Data Traveler 4GB Swivel drive: 20MB/s 6.3MB/s
Kingston DTI 4GB Gen I: 17MB/s 8.5MB/s

OCZ Rally 2 8GB Dual Channel: 29MB/s 14.5MB/s
OCZ Diesel 4GB Single Channel: 30MB/s 7.5MB/s
OCZ Diesel 16GB Single Channel: 31MB/s 11MB/s

Adata 4GB Compact Flash (budget): 17MB/s 8.5MB/s
Digital Extreme 16GB CF (budget): 19.5MB/s 10.5MB/s

Of the devices I have, the OCZ Rally 2 seems to take the crown for overall performance.