misteRate.info

Speedy reads, slow writes, but rock solid

Purchased this for use with a MacBook Pro. As formatted from the factory, it was fast for reading any kind of files, and for writing large (multi-megabyte) files, but painfully slow for writing many small files. Benchmarking tools (and most online reviews) don’t appear to pick up this random small file problem.

Since I don’t need to use it in a Windows environment, I reformatted the device as a Mac OS Journaled GUID partition, and the write speeds improved somewhat. I then created a 31 GB “sparse bundle” image on it, which is a OS X “Leopard” technology that makes a growable disk image of many 8 MB chunks. This seemed to accelerate writes significantly, but still nowhere near the maker’s claimed write performance.

For Mac users who have no plans to plug it into a PC, I recommend reformatting it. As a bonus, if you create a sparse bundle disk image, you can set that disk image to be AES-128 or AES-256 encrypted, giving you peace of mind in case you lose or misplace the USB drive.

I’m very happy with the apparent durability, and very happy with the read speed. I’m less happy with the write speed, but since I’m using it for write-once/read-many type of backups, it’s okay.

Note that flash memory technology for sizes 8 GB and up is different than the 4 GB and smaller drives, and all manufacturers making this size seem to share this “slow for small files” problem when doing “real world” file tests instead of benchmarks.

Update (2/4/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, Corsair Flash Survivor 32 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive CMFUSBSRVR-32GB Electronics, was written by M. Terretta.

The average rating for this item is 4 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.