Lexar vs. Kingston
A couple of weeks ago I went to Fry's to buy a copy of Trend Micro Internet Security which would be free after two rebates. I really try not to buy anything else at Fry's because if it isn't on sale, it usually isn't a good deal. However I have been looking to upgrade my Lexar Firefly jump drive that I raved about a couple of years ago. My rule is I don't like to spend more than $10 on a thumb drive. They had a bin of Kingston Data Traveler 110 thumb drives with 2 GB of memory for only $9.99, so I bought one. That's four times as much memory as the Firefly. It's a decent drive, but bulky compared to the Firefly. The USB part slides out so it doesn't need a cap, but it has to be connected to my keychain when I plug it in and it blocks adjacent USB drives due to the large size.
Naturally, the following weekend Fry's advertised a 4 GB Firefly for less than $10 after rebate. I looked up the Firefly on Amazon and there were a lot of complaints about it being slow. If I was going to be moving 4 GB of data, I didn't want that data to move slowly. So I decided to run a test. I moved a 344 MB video file (appropriately enough, an episode of the TV series Firefly) to the Firefly and timed how long it took: 129 seconds. Then I measured how long it took to copy the file back to my computer: 40 seconds. So the write speed was a lot slower than the read speed. Next I tried the Kingston drive and got 57 seconds for writing and 19 seconds for reading. That's more than twice as fast. At work I have e-mail archives that are about 2 GB and I need to bring them home for a backup. That would be 12.5 minutes on a Firefly and only 5.5 minutes for the Kingston. That's a big difference. It seems like these speeds should be posted somewhere. So here they are (in megabytes per second):
Lexar Firefly 512 MB: 2.67 write, 8.61 read
Kingston Data Traveler 110 2 GB: 6.04 write, 18.12 read
I decided that as much as I like the form factor of the Firefly, I didn't want to wait so long and so I didn't get the 4 GB model.