I was at NewEgg looking to buy a USB Flash drive. I never considered doing research or comparing specs since I thought they all were basically the same item with different housings.

I was aware that certain drives were U3 compliant which means they will allow you to run certain application directly from the USB drive itself. One popular U3 application is Firefox. It is prety cool to plug in a flash drive into any computer and run Firefox. To learn more about U3 check out the official site.

So I was searching for USB drivea at NewEgg and I was basing my choice on price and style. A comment in one of the reviews caught my eye. It mentioned that a certain model was “slow”.

I never considered read and write speeds when choosing a flash drive. Well after a few hours os research I have learned quite a bit.

Apparently there are different types of technologies to manufacturer flash memory chips. One is SLC (Single-Level Cell) and the other is MLC (Multi-Level Cell) Flash technology. SLC chips are faster. I almost never saw SLC or MLC mentioned in any specs, so the it’s pretty useless knowledge.

One item you will mentiones in flash drive specifications is transfer rates. There are usually differences between read and wrote rates but I’m going to assume it’s all the same. The slowest USB drives transfer data between 3-6Mbs. The fastest can approach 20Mb/s and even higher. Keep in mind that USB 2.0 is specifies a max transfer rate of 60 MB/s but I have never seen that rate approached by any USB device in the real world.

If you are simply storing word documents or a few music files then the speed won’t really matter to you. However I plan to transfer many files that can easily use up a Gig of space. There is a pretty big difference between taking 50 seconds versus 200 seconds to transfer data.

So which drive am I going to buy ?
As of right now I am looking to get a 2GB drive. I reviewed test data at Toms Hardware and then cross checked this info with prices at NewEgg

I have narrowed it down to the following choices.
Corsair 2GB Flash Drive @ $35
Transcend JetFlash @ $39
OCZ Rally 2GB @ $35

The Corsair has many great reviews, it looks cool and has a rubber casing to help protect it better. However it is a little bulkier because of the casing. There are times when space is an issue when plugging in the USB drive to a port.

The Transcend and OCZ drives are speed demons and a little smaller.

I probably will be a total geek and carry the drive on my keychain so the Corsair is looking like the drive of choice for me.

The plot does thicken a bit if you consider ReadyBoost when choosing a USB drive. ReadyBoost will be a technology available in Windows Vista which will aloow you to use your USB Flash Drive as RAM to boost system performance (in theory at least). I have no intention on upgrading to Vista in the near future so ReadyBoost is not a consideration at this time for me.

In order for a USB drive to be used with ready boost it must meet certain requirements that rae tested when you plug the USB drive into your Windows Vista computer.

-The USB Key must be at least USB 2.0
-The device must be able to do 3.5 MB/s for 4 KB random reads uniformly across the entire device and 2.5 MB/s for 512 KB random writes uniformly across the device.

Now just because your USB drive’s specifications says it can perform 10Mb/s transfers does not meant it will work with ReadyBoost. The 3.5 MB/s is for random reads. Most manufacturers sates transfer specs for sequential reads rates.

Many reviewers mentioned that the OCZ Rally did pass the readyboost test. I suspect the Transcend JetFlash would work as well since it has a very random access time compared to other USB drives.

Apparently Microsfot is working with manufacturers to help them test their devices so they can label their USB Flash Drives as “ReadyBoost capable devices”.

Here is a nice ReadyBoost FAQ