The majority of USB flash drives found on the market will achieve a mediocre performance, even when they are from well know companies like Kingston. Only a few companies are really working to improve the performance of pen drives, and the only two worth mentioning are Geil and OCZ.

Geil achieved what we thought it was impossible: they developed a USB flash drive faster than OCZ’s Rally. So we are giving David 100 256 MB our ”Golden Award“ seal, and the same seal goes to Rally 512 MB and Rally 2 GB from OCZ, since both have a performance far higher than the average.

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Figure 4: Geil David 100 and OCZ Rally were awarded with our Golden Award.

Why bothering with performance? Think about this: on a 2 GB part you can store the equivalent of three CDs – a huge data capacity. What is the point of having this colossal storage capacity available if transferring data will take forever?

Of course performance isn’t everything. Corsair, Kingston and Kingmax provide really different features. Corsair, like we have already exposed on our previous roundup, came with this all-rubber cover to make the product shockproof and waterproof on its Flash Voyager. Its performance was better than the average but not as great as Geil’s and OCZ’s, so we kept our ”Silver Award“ for Corsair Flash Voyager.

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Figure 5: Corsair Flash Voyager was awarded with our Silver Award.

Kingston provides a built-in hardware-based encryption engine on DataTraveller Elite and U3 technology on DataTraveller U3 Smart, while Kingmax provides the world’s smalled (and thinner) USB flash drive. It is really a pity that these devices don’t have a performance as great as Geil’s, OCZ’s and Corsair’s.

If you aren’t a performance geek and are looking for specific features found on those models, they can be a very good choice for you.