USB flash memory drives are now part of our lives. Smaller and with a capacity higher than floppy disks, these devices are the perfect replacement for the old floppies. Hook one of these to your key chain and you have a perfect tool for carrying data wherever you go, especially when you go to places you don’t think you’ll need one (like your best buddy swimming pool party – We’re pretty sure that you’ll want to copy the pictures by the end of the party).

With capacities going higher every day, one question comes to mind: what about speed? Do all USB drives have the same transfer speed? In this review we selected four models from very well known companies for a roundup: Corsair, Kingston, MSI and OCZ.

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Figure 1: Models selected for this roundup.

We reviewed the following models:

• Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB;
• Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 512 MB;
• MSI Mega Flash 128 MB;
• OCZ Rally 512 MB.

You may think that is unfair to put the MSI model into this roundup. Yes, you are right. The reason that we included this model is that we wanted a “normal” USB drive with smaller capacity in our benchmarking, so you can compare the performance difference between a regular USB drive and a hi-speed one.

All reviewed models are USB 2.0, so you need to connect them to an USB 2.0 port in order to achieve their highest possible performance.

Note: After we published this review it came to our attention that this model from Kingston is outdated. Kingston is going to send us their latest USB drive, which they say has an outsdanding performance. So let's wait and see.