Not all USB thumb drives are created equal. With all the marketing names and jargon, sometimes it can be difficult for consumers to actually know which thumb drive they need. This post is about speed comparison of 2 USB thumb drives: Sandisk Cruzer Extreme USB 3.0 32GB and Kingston DataTraveler microDuo 3.0 32GB. The Kingston drive has 2 interfaces: the normal-sized USB 3.0 and the smaller microUSB ports for quick use with Windows or Android tablets with microUSB OTG port. There is no specific reason why the comparison is between these two products other than they are the thumb drives I currently owned. Can’t do a comparison against something I don’t have.
For this test, I use two different computers. To test the USB 3.0 ports, I use a MacBook Pro with Retina Display. This laptop has built-in USB 3.0 ports and both USB thumb drive being tested promises USB 3.0 speed for their full-size USB ports. To test the microUSB port, I use Toshiba Encore 8 Windows 8.1 tablet using software tool called Microsoft RichCopy to get the copy durations (I certainly don’t want to wait over 2 hours for my copy process to complete just to time it). However, this additional tool also does something more than just helping me to get the durations. RichCopy is a free tool that promises to “speed up” the required time to copy files in Windows by doing parallel copies. In my case, I just use its default setting that seems to parallel copy 3 files at any one time.
I prepared three sets of data to be written to, and read from the USB thumb drives:
- Data A is 1 large file. The size is 4.25 GB.
- Data B is a set of 12 medium files. The total size is 5.81 GB.
- Data C is a set of 45,976 small files. The total size is 5.47 GB.
Testing process is simple. First I formatted each memory card using ExFAT so at the beginning of the test, they are empty. To measure WRITE speed, I copied each set of data into each memory card and timed the process. To measure READ speed, I copied back those sets of data back into my computer and timed the process.
| Operation | Data | Sandisk Cruzer Extreme | Kingston DT microDuo (full-size USB) | Kingston DT microDuo (microUSB) |
| WRITE | A | 45 secs avg speed 96.71 MB/s |
5 mins 48 secs avg speed 12.51 MB/s |
17 mins 54 secs avg speed 4.05 MB/s |
| WRITE | B | 1 min 1 sec avg speed 97.52 MB/s |
8 mins 3 secs avg speed 12.32 MB/s |
35 mins 58 secs avg speed 2.76 MB/s |
| WRITE | C | 5 mins 37 secs avg speed 16.62 MB/s |
27 mins 5 secs avg speed 3.45 MB/s |
2 hours 49 mins 11 secs avg speed 0.55 MB/s |
| READ | A | 37 secs avg speed 117.62 MB/s |
1 min 24 secs avg speed 51.81 MB/s |
4 mins 6 secs avg speed 17.69 MB/s |
| READ | B | 50 secs avg speed 118.98 MB/s |
1 mins 52 secs avg speed 53.12 MB/s |
6 mins 29 secs avg speed 15.29 MB/s |
| READ | C | 3 mins 14 secs avg speed 28.87 MB/s |
10 mins 27 secs avg speed 8.93 MB/s |
12 mins 21 secs avg speed 7.56 MB/s |
As expected, copying a lot of small files take significantly longer time because there are additional process that must be completed for each file. READ operation always faster than WRITE operation for the same set of data. Sandisk Cruzer Extreme performs impressively faster in almost every test, making it a clear winner of this comparison. I expected that the microUSB interface from my Kingston DT microDuo will perform slower than its full-size USB 3.0 counterpart, but I did not imagine it would be this slow, even slower than baseline class 4 SDHC memory card.
It is worth to mention that Kingston DT microDuo 3.0 becomes extremely hot after every WRITE session. The temperature is higher than what my hand can handle, so I always need few minutes to cool it down before doing another test. Also, some people seems to get confused because there are two different models of Kingston DataTraveler microDuo. The older model uses USB 2.0 and the newer one (the one I have) uses USB 3.0.
Nah ini SanDsk bagus banget nih