Fast Usb Thumb Drive

Does anyone know of a fast thumb drive. I have a 4gb one thats great but I want it to run apps, but its not that fast for doing that. Just wondering if anyone has some good experiences with some or whatnot. I was looking at the corsair voyager...but they are pretty fugly.

If it helps at all, I need to run java, c++, visual basic, firefox, openoffice, etc. Its bascically going to me thumb drive for school, so that all my settings are saved already on the drive and all my programming is already there too.

Thanks, Tyler

 

OCZ Rally seems to have great reviews on speed, though the 2gb and 4gb versions, the 8gb version seems to suffer in speed.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208164

 

Alternatively you could go for the good old notebook-drive-in-an-enclosure approach. Depending on the drive you use, flat out read write speeds can be much faster than anything a conventional USB drive can offer, though seek times will suffer. It'll probably also cost a bit more.

Otherwise, those Corsair Voyagers do seem to get pretty good transfer speeds.

 

Wow thanks allot, just did a scan on mine and it was 11 mb avg

 

Ya I got a 2.5 external, but it seems like the external needs allot of juice, even with 2 usbs plugged in, its still not enough for some comp.

 

All depends on what drive is. I think a certain flavor of 7200RPM Seagate Momentus can eat a whopping four watts at load, while other drives like a 4200RPM Hitachi 4K120 will use less than two watts at load.

Refer to http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

Also, oftentimes you only need both USB plugs when the drive is spinning up; depending on the drive, one USB plug should suffice once the drive gets going.

 

If you get a Corsair Voyager the be sure to get the GT

I have all 3, the VoyagerGT is the one I carry everywhere, the OCZ Rally is the one I stick in my LG BLuRay player, and the Plain Voyager is the one that sits as an emergency backup with some utils in my laptop case (there's a Voyager GT there too with Tiny & Ubuntu Linux to boot from and some utils), I gave away a few of my other plain voyagers because at about 12 MB/s they're too slow for me but blazing for most people using generic or memorex sticks.

My experience the GT is just above 20MB/s sometimes cresting 22MB/s the OCZ rally is just under 20MB/s sometimes cresting into the 20.5-sh range.

Main thing will be price, the OCZ are almost as fast and usually 1/4 the price (the one I picked up for my BR player was 2GB for $14.99).

 

I have both the Corsair Flash Voyager GT 2 and 4Gb models, and both are extremely fast.

I think Ghola, tested the speed of his flash voyager cards, and his cards outpaced mine. It may be the USB hub on my laptop slowing the usb drives down.

Here is the hdtune for my 2Gb Flash Voyager GT:


Here is the hdtune of my 4Gb Flash Voyager GT:


K-TRON

 

I just bought a http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=26326&vpn=PEF4GUSB&manufacture=Patriot

Looks and sounds promising.....so fingers crossed (will post tests after i get it )

 

Can anyone compare this with an ext HD based device? ie. 2.5" WD Passport and 3.5" WD My Home Ed.?? Just curious to SEE if there are any significant differences in speed.

 

My 1TB Hitachi external harddrive gets 28mb/sec continuous over USB.
It has a Coolgear SATA2 to USB adaptor, with a JBOD 32chip.
I think 28mb/sec is the maximum throughput of USB, I know the drive can do like 70mb/sec in a desktop but USB limits the transfer to 28mb/sec.

K-TRON

 

I have a Buffalo 320GB external 2.5" harddrive. The drive inside is a Samsung.

 

My Buffalo 2.5" 5400RPM 320GB External HD only needs one USB plug. It does come with 2 plugs but I didn't notice any performance difference by using 1 or 2 plugs, not even HD Tune.

 

Some drives have low enough spin-up power draws such that they don't need two USB ports to spin up. Other times there's got a small controller built into the enclosure that reduces spin-up power draw that works to the same end. I know a friend of mine has a WD Passport that spins-up and runs with only one USB jack.

 

Don't all external 2.5" drives need only one USB port? They pretty much need the same power requirement right?

 

Actually I bought a 2GB stick of that at MemoryExpress here in Calgary (I buy some stuff at NCIX when can't locally) , and I found it to perform near the OCZ, primarily at 17-19MB/s, I traded it for the OCZ (hoping for better in the 'dual channel memory') but it was about the same.

 

Yeah I don't understand that, that's way WAY above what I ever got with a typical plain Voyager and even my GT.

I get the same as you and it's obviously not the interface as my external HDs are in the mid 30GB/s range.

 

Well, I don't thnk I have seen shipping that fast, they are basically on the other side of canada and I got it less thena day..... well here it is



for some reason at the very start it was 6.2 mb/s