USB thumbdrives are very popular, the main reason is their portability, they make it extremely easy to transport data from one place to another without having to carry a CD or DVD with you. One of the best things about USB thumbdrives is that they can be re-used over and over again, unlike a CD or DVD, unless of course you get the RW variety, still though Cds/DVDs are big and bulky to carry with you, as are external hard drives. Capacities for thumbdrives are growing constantly, as is the speed at which they transfer data, now with Vista here, there is even more use for these with ReadyBoost. Today for review I have the fastest USB drive I have tested or owned, it is from Super Talent, makers of numerous memory solutions, so read on to check it out…
Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive
Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos
Sponsor: Super Talent
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive
Model: DH_BK
Description:
The DH style’s aluminum body is rugged enough to keep your data safe under tough environmental conditions. The 200X version delivers breath-taking data transfer speeds in excess of 30MB per second. This award winning USB drive is the perfect mobile storage.
Dimension: 64mm x 16.8 mm x 7.1 mm
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Technical Details:
– Full compatibility with USB 1.1 and 2.0
– Dual Channel Flash Memory Architecture
– Ultra-fast 200X available with 30MB/sec Read speed
– Hot plug and play; Functions like another hard drive
– Supports password protection
– No driver needed for most operating systems (Windows 98SE driver available online)
– LED indicates power, busy
– More than 10 years data retention
– Limited lifetime warranty
– Supports ReadyBoost
A Better Look at Things
:
The Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive comes package in the easy open variety of plastic clamshell.
The back of course lists the basic specs and features, not much to the packaging, but it does the job.
I’ve mentioned the Super Talent USB drive is fast, but it also features an aluminum body as well making it fairly durable.
It’s black, also available in silver, and it has the Super Talent logo on it along with the capacity listed.
The back, or tail of this thumbdrive is white, behind that end cap is a red LED that light up when powered on and blinks for activity. The end cap also features a small loop that can be used with a lanyard or possibly a keychain.
As with most thumbdrives the USB port is covered with a cap for protection, the cap for the Super Talent drive is made of plastic unlike the body of the drive itself.
Well that’s that for pictures, it’s a USB drive after all, not much to really photograph…
Installation, Testing and Comparison
The LED on the Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive is a very bright red when lit up, making it very easy to see what the drive is up to, and it matched quite nicely with my red LED USB cable…
Well I’ve told you it’s fast, but how about some proof? Onto the testing part of this…
First up we have HD Tach RW from SimpliSoft, in the following graph you’ll see the Super Talent compared to other USB drives and a MicroSD card in a USB adapter. Before receiving this thumbdrive for review my fastest drive was the ATP Toughdrive, well not anymore, but it is fairly close though…
In the graph Lower scores are better for Random Access results while higher scores are better for everything else.
You can see from the results that the Super Talent USB drive is the fastest, with only the Swissbit Mini-Twist beating it in Random Access times, but only by .2 milliseconds, and well I highly doubt that anyone will notice that whole .2 milliseconds…
Next set of tests is SiSoft Sandra 2007 Removable Storage. In this test Higher Results are better for both scores. There’s a lot of information in the graph which you can click to see it larger. In the graph are results for the same SUB drives as the HD Tach graph, along with standard SATA, SATA2 and a portable 1.8 hard drive as well thrown in for comparison.
From the results we can see the Super talent blows all other portable storage away with no problems, and it looks like it even beats my Maxtor SATA drive, but those results could be skewed a bit as that drive is my system drive, but it’s a general idea anyway for comparison.
The final test, the one I think that is actually the best, or most understandable to the average person is Diskbench. Diskbench can be used to measure several things, but I am only focusing on the times to Copy to, Copy from and Read a file on the USB Drives. Since my ATP was the fastest before, I figured I would put it up against the Super Talent and see what happens. The results are in seconds, with the lowest of course being the best, or taking the least amount of time to Copy a file from the drive, Copy a file to the drive and Read a file that is on the drives. The file was the same for all tests, it is a 358MB .AVI video file, copied from and to my main C: drive as most people would be doing.
Obviously, the Super talent drive is superior for transferring files to it, but I was very surprised by the file read time and the copy from time, with the Super Talent drive taking essentially three times longer than the ATP to read the file and almost twice as long to copy the file from itself to my hard drive.
So looking at this test, we can see the Super Talent really isn’t the fastest drive is it?
Diskbench is a great test to really show the real-world performance of things, the hell with all the indiscernible numbers from the other tests, Diskbench tells us how long in real-time it takes to transfer the file. If I tell you one drive takes 50MB/s and the other takes 80MB/s to transfer a file the average Joe user will be like huh? Now, if I tell you it take 12 secs on this drive and 6 seconds on this drive, the average Joe user knows exactly what I mean and understands completely what those numbers mean in real life..
One great thing about Diskbench is that it is free, go get it here at Nodesoft: http://www.nodesoft.com/
All tests and benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt really, they all depend on certain factors and those factors are ever changing, so the results can be different every single time you run the test, so what you see in the graphs are averages of several tests. Still the Super Talent drive comes out on top in every synthetic test run.
As for the idea of Vista ReadyBoost, well the jury is still out on that one. I do have Vista installed and this thumbdrive works fine with it, but I really didn’t see any performance gains with or without any USB drive in use, it’s not just the Super Talent, I’ve tried others and I really haven’t noticed any major improvements with Vista with or without a ReadyBoost drive installed.
All in all though the Super Talent drive ‘feels’ faster than all the other drives, I’ve used it quite a few times and it works great.
Summary:
The Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive is an exceptional USB device, topping the speeds of most others out there today. It’s stylish aluminum body not only looks great but protects your data as well. If you’re in the market for a new USB flash drive then I can honestly recommend this one from Super Talent, it’s fast, small and durable.
DragonSteelMods gives the Super Talent DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive a 4.5 out of 5 score and our Recommended Award as well.
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Pros:
-Fast
-Tough, aluminum body
-Attractive
-Bright LED indicator
Cons:
-None
I would like to thank Super Talent for the chance to review the DH Series (4gb) 200x USB Flash Drive and for their support of DSM.