Post them here!

Currently USB drives offer Read performance that varys between 2mbps and 33mbps. Latencies range between 0.4ms and +60ms. The purpose of this post is to gather information to help you pick the right drive because some drives are 20x faster than others and cost only a little more.

Nand flash is changing rapidly. Reviews are in reverse order by date published for increased relevance but may review older products.

Jan 2007 Corsair 8gb http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7704

Oct 2006 roundup http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/384/1

May 2006 roundup http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/321/1

Oct 2005 roundup http://www.anandtech.com/memory/sh [...] i=2549&p=1

April 2005 roundup http://arstechnica.com/reviews/har [...] 2005.ars/1

June 2004 roundup http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/flash.ars/1



Why collect this information? The cost difference between slow USB flash drives and fast ones is not that great so you can get a lot more performance for a small premium if you make an informed buying decision. Good flash drives have random access times <1ms making them very useful for swap drives. SATA flash drives are not yet available and will be very expensive when they are, USB flash drives and arrays may make a good substitue offering increased performance for a lower price (and less capacity). If you're copying large files some flash drives have many times faster read and write speeds than others and may significantly affect user experience.

Other links related to flash memory performance and use:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000680.html
Corsair Voyarger destruction test http://www.hexus.tv/show.php?show=17

Post links to USB flash drive reviews and such and I will update the OP. Newer articles that test several drives under the same conditions are prefered.

Have a flash drive? Bench it and post here.

If you want something put up on the leader board plz have benches to back it up and link to somewhere people can actually buy it. Cost/gb is of minimal concern but drives under 1gb will not be considered for the leaderboard unless they are much faster than other drives available as smaller sizes aren't as useful.

Any suggestions on post format appreciated.

Does it really make a difference if a flash drive is 5ms faster than another? It's going to take a second (minimum) longer for you to notice its done transferring, and pull it out of the USB socket. Seriously...I understand there are those people that 'have' to have the best and fastest...but can a human even tell the difference between 3-5ms in transfer rate? No. Will it possibly waste an entire .3 seconds of your life for one to finish copying a 50mb file before the other. Yes...that makes it entirely worth it.

Corsair 8GB
Not a review....but a funny video on USB drives. 1st part of the series.
Tested to Destruction!

You have obviosly never moved a large (4gig+) file with a flash drive. If your using the file transfer wirard, and its 6 gigs. You talking up to 5-10minutes difference, which adds up quick.

For moving a few files from one computer to another, no, access times don't make much difference.

For moving large files, transfer rate makes a huge difference.

But, every improvement you can get in both access time and transfer rate is going to make a difference in the amount of performance gain that something like Vista's ReadyBoost will be able to realize. Also, if you've ever made a bootable USB flash drive (for doing diagnostics or system recovery), slow USB drives make it painful. Anything that improves access time & transfer rate makes the overall process faster.

No, I use my USB hard drive. And if it becomes an issue with time, I just let it sit and do it's thing, and I come back later. Time management.

On a single copy-past file transfer, no, you won't notice the difference between 5ms and .4ms. If you're trying to do hundreds of transactions a second it's a huge difference. If your CPU and GFX card can't even begin to render something until it's been pulled from the HD it also makes a big difference.

Also, if you actually read the stuff I linked to, you'd notice we aren't talking about 5ms differences here. More like 50ms. Yes, some flash drives are really that slow. Microsoft is telling people to buy Flash HDs because they are fast but some of them are, in fact, considerably slower than 5yo IDE HDs.

On a single transfer of a large file you will also definately notice a difference between 30mbps read and 10mbps read speeds (some flash drives are even much worse than 10mbps).

The LEADERBOARD is the top 3 drives I've found so far as a ballance between read, write, and latency performance. That's why there isn't a big difference between them, they are the Leaders. I didn't bother to transcribe stats and look up prices for crap drives.

I will now go edit the OP to make this more clear, ty

Now I'm assuming that you mean MB/s and not Mb/s. You may want to update that to avoid any confusion.

-mcg

ty, updated.

Had a chance to check out the Corsair and added it to the the leaderboard. Different test beds but either one should be capable of maxing out these drives. They were both tested with HD tack v3 and the 8gb version is significantly faster than the 512mb Corsair Voyager with only slightly more latency than the ATP

Hopefully I can get some info together and buy a few of them myself and bench them (reletives might be getting thumb drives as presents until I find the one I want to use, assuming I can get the results I think I can get with the ones I buy as testers and don't just abandon the idea xD).