All USB Flash are created different. But some are more different than others.
USB flash comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, SLC, MLC dual and quad channel. But it’s all much of a muchness when trying to do stuff. What bothers me is the erroneous speed claims.
Since I boot off USB a lot (windows xp embedded) it helps to have blazingly fast flash or a really slow brain. A particular tool I like is the
Flash Drive Tester
which will write all over your flash and tell you how fast it did it.
Sony Pocketbit USM16GLX.
No silly plastic cap to lose, which is a plus. However, its speed claims appear to be… shall we say optimistic. The blurb sheet that comes with the flash says.
| model | read | write |
|---|---|---|
| usm2glx | 27 | 7 |
| usm4glx/8glx | 31 | 11 |
| usm16glx | 30 | 11 |
Survey says, write 13, read 25.
Fortunately, for this particular usage, the capacity (windows PE SDI tools are dumb and cant do smart filesystem copies.) is what counts. The performance is mediocre. The TDK (insert packaging rage) writes at 15~17 and reads around 22~24. but it runs clonezilla and that does do smart filesystem copies.
