Cheap USB 2.0 Drives
With prices of 16GB USB 3.0 drives hovering around $40, I was looking for a cheap $10 option. Basic throw away drives that I didn’t care to lose, didn’t copy to often but were really small and easy to pack.
I compared the SanDisk Cruzer Blade against the Kingston DataTraveler 108
- both 16GB USB 2.0 flash drives. Both were formatted FAT as most USB drives should work cross-platform as a simple sneaker net.
The SanDisk wins with a cumulative score of 654.6 compared to Kingston’s score of 393.43. Benchmark results available in a gist.
The SanDisk Cruzer Blade won in every single test except Sequential Uncached Read using 4K blocks and Random Uncached Writes using 256K blocks. The SanDisk achieved 4.19 MB/sec and 0.51 MB/sec, respectively. The Kingston pulled in 4.46 MB/sec and 2.70 MB/sec, respectively.
The numbers for the 4k blocks are very close but the gap in the single 256K block is fairly substantial. However, given that FAT32 is in 4k sectors - the clear winner is still the SanDisk.