Labs

USB flash drives

To test each flash drive's real world performance, we ran six file transfer tests on each drive. For each test, we used an automated script to copy files from the test PC's RAM to the drive. As RAM is far faster than flash memory, this ensured that the flash drive was always the limiting factor in our speed tests.

In our large files test, a 100MB file was copied to and from each drive five times to simulate copying large files such as video. In our small files test, 100MB of small files was copied to and from each drive five times, to simulate how long it takes to transfer smaller files such as text documents or spreadsheets. Finally, we timed how long it took to copy 500MB of photos to and from the drive to simulate backing up a typical digital camera's memory card.