We had a chance to play with the latest from Super Talent USB offer. The 8GB drive is branded as a 120X one and it should be exceptionally fast. It looks slick and nice, and it flashes in red when you write on it.
It comes in a slick plastic case and it is very thin, as thin as it can be in such a case. The 8GB stick is packed in a small package and it supports Vista boot ready. This feature will speed up a start up of some applications for a few seconds. It is a nice feature.
The use of this USB key is really easy. You remove the cap, plug it in a free USB 2.0 or 1.1 port and that’s it. Windows recognizes the USB key as a small drive, 8 GB flash drive to be more precise. Our sample had 8GB of storage, which is more than a DVD and should be enough for anyone. Well, there is always space for more.
We decided to give this key a try in Sandra XI under Vista and to test the speed under Windows XP.
Real life test
In our first test we copied a folder with about 90 files, documents and pictures such are the ones that you normally have in your business day. It took us 20 seconds to copy such a folder. With small files the drive has an average of 0.85 MB/s. Corsair's 8GB Voyager finished this task just a few seconds faster, three to be precise.
It took 10 seconds to copy a 60 MB of WMA music in nine files. In this test the drive is able to write 6 MB/s. A Corsair Voyager 8GB does the same task in just five seconds, twice as fast. We copied a folder with 342 MB of pictures with total of 170 pictures and it took us 80 seconds to finish a task. In this case the write speed was about 4.25 MB/s which is not that great.
In the last test we copied a 710 MB AVI file and it took us 99 seconds to finish the transfer of the file from a PC to the USB stick. Super talent likes the bigger files as it writes 7.17 MB/s in this scenario. Corsair needs only 40 seconds to copy the same AVI file which is twice as fast and an average of 17.75 MB+/s.
Supertalent 8GB drive supports Vista boot ready
Sandra XI scores
We tested the USB drive in Sandra XI under Windows Vista. In the 2MB read test Super Talent can read a file at an amazing 34031 KB/s or 226 CD speeds. When it comes to writing the same 2MB files the performance drops to 5564 KB/s or only 37 CD speeds.
The situation is a bit better with a bigger 64 MB file. The drive reads the bigger file at 34953 KB/s or 233X while it writes at 7646 KB/s or at exactly 50X. This is pretty much what we proved in our real life testing.
Conclusion
It is cool to have 8 GB, but we are not impressed with the speed of this device. Corsair's 8GB Voyager is faster in almost any scenario and in some cases it is dramatically faster. Super Talent 8 GB is a good choice but it is not the fastest device on the market.
We also failed to find this device available and the closest one we could find is the 4 GB one at newegg for $30.
It is nice and slick, but not the fastest we've seen.