On HD Tach we could measure two parameters: the average read speed, listed in megabytes per second (the higher, the better), and access time, listed in milliseconds (the lower, the better).

David 100 from Geil was the fastest USB flash drive in our roundup. On HD Tach 3 it was 7.87% faster than OCZ Rally 512 MB, 22.55% faster than OCZ Rally 2 GB, 50.00% faster than Corsair Flash Voyager 512 MB, 95.92% faster than Kingston DataTraveller U3 Smart 1 GB and 150.43% faster than Kingston DataTraveller Elite 2 GB. Really impressive. It was a pity that Kingmax Super Stick got very low results.

Access time measures the time the time the computer spends accessing the device before starting transferring data. The lower this value, the better, i.e. the fastest the device is.

Kingston DataTraveller U3 Smart 1 GB and Geil David 100 256 MB achieved the best results here, only 0.4 ms. Kingston DataTraveller 2.0 512 MB and Kingston DataTraveller Elite 2 GB had also achieved a terrific result, with 0.5 ms, and OCZ Rally 512 MB was also great with 0.6 ms. The problem here was Super Stick from Kingmax, with a lousy 68.9 ms access time. We repeated this test three times, with the same results. Ouch.