Testing:
Testing was broken down into two phases; analyzing data transfer rates and analyzing the speed to launch applications installed on the flash drives. As mentioned earlier in the review, the 2GB
Super Talent Godfather drive was tested head-to-head with three other USB flash drives; a 2GB silver/blue switchblade style drive provided as a promotional item by Sapphire, a 2GB PNY Attache drive, and a 4GB Crucial Gizmo Junior.
Data transfer speeds were tested by reading and writing 1150 files in 49 folders that occupied 350MB in disk space. There was a mix of files including txt, pdf, dwg, doc, xls, mp3, html, jpg, and gif extensions, and together they might be comparable to a typical "My Documents" folder. A stopwatch was used to time the duration of each transfer to/from a RAID 0 array of SATA 3Gbps drives, and the host computer was rebooted between tests. The chart below details the results, and while the read speeds are about even, the write speed with the Godfather drive dominated the competition. I retested the Super Talent and Crucial drives just to be sure, and was pretty impressed when the results were duplicated.
The next phase of testing involved using the suite of programs available from
Portable Apps. The programs are made to run off flash drives without officially installing or making registry entries. It is a great way to have the programs you want when on the go, and I have been using the suite heavily recently. I decided to load the suite on to each of the four drives being tested in order to compare the times required to launch three of the applications I use most often. The chart below details the launch times measured using a stop watch for GIMP 2.6.3, Open Office Writer 2.4, and Firefox 3.5 (all three were set to open to blank pages, and I stopped the watch when the hour glass turned back into an arrow cursor). What we see is that the Godfather is the fastest for all three programs.
I had been regularly using the Gizmo Junior drive because of its small size, but was growing weary of its slow speeds. The Godfather is about as small, but faster. I wasn't looking for a new flash drive to use on a daily basis, but the Godfather made me an offer I can't refuse! (sorry, I had to abuse at least one quote in here).
