I’ve got a bunch of little USB flash drives hanging around. It is almost as if they rain from the sky. In fact, if you go to a trade show, they sometimes in fact do! I had a new requirement of a flash drive recently though. I wanted to actually run an application off of it. Up to now I’ve used them like a “cool” floppy disk. But now I wanted to actually put a program on it and run it from an Windows machine I walked up to. The software worked in this mode, but, to my dismay the flash drives I had were horrible at this.

Pathetic performance is documented below on one of my 1G flash cards.

ATTO Disk Benchmark results for a 1GB USB flash drive showing write speeds up to 2750 MB/s and read speeds up to 8579 MB/s across transfer sizes from 0.5 to 1024 KB.

Of course this problem is easily solved with a credit card and a few clicks on Newegg. I ordered the OCZ Rally2 2G accelerated drive, and solved all of my problems.

ATTO Disk Benchmark results for OCZ Rally2 drive showing read speeds up to 19878 KB/s and write speeds up to 9532 KB/s across transfer sizes from 0.5 to 1024 KB.

It is still no hard drive, but, the performance is very acceptable. And to boot, it’s nicely packaged with a metal enclosure and no wasted room.