Installation, Testing and Comparison
For comparison I’ve got three other USB drives:
First up we have HDTach RW from SimpliSoftware. It’s great benchmarking program to give you some idea as to the performance of your devices, be them removable or not.
Here are the actual screenshots from HDTach from all four USB drives if you wish to see them:
Here is the actual results in a graph to get a nice comparison of these drives. Included you’ll find scores for Burst Speed, Read, Write and Access.
Well from the HDTach tests we can see the Wooden USB Drive isn’t the greatest performer out there…
What would a review this type without using SiSoft Sandra Removable Storage Benchmark, so here’s those results:
As you can see the wooden USB drive from Brando WorkShop actually beats out the ATP Toughdrive…
Ok, my final set of tests is using DiskBench, I like using DiskBench for these types of reviews because it gives you a real world benchmarks and while HDTach and Sandra are nice not everyone knows what they mean really. In using DiskBench I can show you performance number that anyone can relate to, DiskBench will tell us the time it takes to transfer to and from the USB drive and the time it takes to read a file from the same USB drives, I think everyone can understand the lower the times the better performance. I used a 385MB .AVI video file for the tests to simulate what the average user might be doing with their USB drive.
I’m sure you instantly noticed the really large bar on the graph there, the Copy To time is certainly not that great for the Wooden USB Drive is it? 174 seconds to transfer the file from my hard drive to the USB drive, that’s almost three minutes! The other scores are very good, comparable to the other drive I tested…
One thing to note about this drive is that originally I ran all these tests and saw the performance was actually worse than what you’ve seen here, I checked the drive itself and found it was formatted in FAT, I reformatted the drive to FAT32 and did see a nice increase in performance across the board in all tests… All of the results you see are using FAT32 since all the other USB Drives I have are formated that way.
Since it’s basically a blank block
of wood, I was also thinking that it might be interesting to do you
own designs on it by carving or etching the wood.