Testing (continued):
HD Tune:
HD Tune 2.53 gauges drive performance much like HD Tach 3.0.4.0. The graph below details the results for access time, average transfer rate, and burst rate. Lower values are better for access time and higher values are better for the other two categories.
The above chart details the results of the HD Tune benchmark. Once again, the ATP Flash Drives offer a performance increase of 30% to 50% over the other two flash drives.
Real World Testing:
Benchmarks are great for general testing and getting an idea of how something performs, but things are sometimes a bit different in real world usage.
In order to test how the ATP flash drives hold up in a real world situations, I created a folder which contained 500MB of various graphics files, one 200MB MS Access 2007 database, 500MB of MP3s, and 700MB of MP4 video files. These files were initially stored on a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA 3Gbps hard drive for write tests on the various flash drives, and would be the final location for the files after the read tests. A stop watch was used to measure the time it took to transfer the files. Between the write and read tests, the test system was rebooted.
The graph above confirms what the HD Tune and HD Tach benchmarks show, that the ATP flash drives are much faster at reading and writing than the Sandisk Cruzer and Ultra Products FlyDrive.
