OCZ Zee 4GB

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OCZ Zee 4GB

A few weeks back we reviewed the Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB. This 32GB flash drive was very nice just like Corsair's other flash memory products and it boasted an impressive capacity with great read/write speeds, but its price at over $100 USD is not for everyone. For those that can make do with a smaller capacity and are looking to just spend a few dollars in comparison, there is the OCZ Zee. The Zee flash drive is available in capacities up to 16GB, has a more conventional housing, and is backed by a two year warranty (in comparison to Corsair's ten-year backing), but the prices for the Zee USB 2.0 drivers are much more affordable.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14492

[drdabbles]

Great sampling of USB thumb drives. I love the Phoronix hardware reviews. The fact that I can also run the PTS against my own hardware using the same profile as the test in the articles is extremely nice too!

It would be interesting to see the Kanguru E-flash 16GB and 32GB units added to this round-up. I purchased one several months back, and I can't believe how fast it is.

The Kanguru E-flash drives do come at a premium price, though. Currently, Amazon has the 32GB item listed at $118. For that price, however, you get a fast USB 2.0 connector on one end and an eSATA connector on the other end.

[sihv]

Sequential read speed is the most useless of all metrics in flash storage benchmarks. Any cheap MLC stick can deliver tolerable read speeds but writes, especially random writes, make you feel like it's the 80s again. My 16 GB Corsair Voyager GT saturates the USB bus when reading (~30 MB/s) but only managed a crappy 1.5 MB/s on average when I copied a one gigabyte disk image file on it with dd. It would be nice to see write speeds as well in flash benchmarks.

[humpty]

Quite agree with sihv, write speeds are just as important.
Random writes even more so if copying lots of small files.

Who cares about read speeds if it's fast enough to watch a movie? It's when you waiting for the top secret database directory to complete copying so you can escape from the building that matters, no?