Testing The Drive

The sustained read and write speeds of any USB flash memory drive is a very important aspect to consider before you buy it. That's because a slow write speed can limit the usefulness of large flash memory drives. Imagine writing 1GB of data at just 300KB/s!

Kingston did not specify any sustained read or write speeds for the DataTraveler ReadyFlash drive, but that's probably because they are marketing it as a ReadyBoost flash drive. Hence, they have quoted instead random read and write speeds of 5MB/s and 3MB/s respectively.

To test both sustained and random read/write performance of the Kingston DataTraveler ReadyFlash drives, we used both our proprietary filesets and IOMeter.

The two filesets are designed to selectively stress the flash chips and the flash controller. This allows us to see how well they will perform with small files as well as large files. These filesets also serve to simulate real world usage of USB flash drives.

IOMeter was used to test the drives' random read and write speeds according to the Windows Vista ReadyBoost requirements. Reads were done randomly across the entire capacity in chunks of 4KB while writes were set to 512KB.

Test Bed

The Flash Drives