Traxdata EZ Drive 3-way Flash Drive Shootout

Test results

Now its time to put the drives to the test and see how they do. To give you a general idea of what the performance might be, I've used SiSoft Sandra 2007 benchmarking suite and CDCheck. CDR-Zone.COM have found SiSoft Sandra to be a most reliable piece of software for general benchmarking, which is good because I've used two benchmarks from the suite. One should remember that these benchmarks are an accurate recording of a moment in time, but results may vary in real-life situations. It all depends on the system, USB port, data and load used with the drives. The drives are pitted against each other with a variable thrown in the mix to create a good contrast. Please don't use the benchmarks as a definite source but more as a general guide.

EZ Drive test results These benchmarks allow us to show you the test results of the EZ drives per separate benchmark. Sisoft Sandra 2007 File System Benchmark Sisoft Sandra 2007 Removable Storage Benchmark CDCheck Benchmark

From the benchmark results you can see that the Dragon lags a little behind from the other two drives. This can be explained by the Dragon being faulty perhaps, but I don't think that's the case. The removable drive benchmark shows the performance of the Dragon being closer to an older type flash drive. Since all of the drives have the same type of USB controller onboard, it means that the Dragon drive must have a slower, perhaps older, type of flash memory than the other two drives. All in all the drives perform very well in the benchmarks, nothing to be ashamed of.

I've tested the drives with a security part that was unlocked as well. The File system benchmark didn't seem to mind and saw little to no changes in the results. On the other two benchmarks the results were slightly slower in some areas and slightly faster in others, that on average is pretty much the same performance and that's a very good result.

The compatibility tests are designed to show some real life cases on how the drives may perform. I have used different types of media on the drive and try to play, access or load it and see how well it performs. Some types of media have theoretical bit-rates to make them play ok, if the drives don't perform as fast as they should, the media should be unplayable. Below you will find the results listed.

The music media types had no problems whatsoever playing. I would have expected some of the video media types to stutter, but they passed the test as well. Even when I combined several types of media and played them at once, the drives held their own, no falter or nothing.

The bit-rate values for the operating systems, documents and pictures don't apply here; those types of data use what ever throughput from the file system is available. That means if the media, on which it is carried, is slow, it will load slowly and the other way around too. However if the media is too slow you will receive errors and timeouts.

Booting from the drives proved to be a little tricky in some cases. DOS startup files don't come by easily, but it loads really fast once you get it going. That's because there's not much to load. Bart's PE is derived from Windows XP and works a lot like Windows PE. It is used for diagnostic purposes. Windows loads slowly at first, because it loads a lot of things in the main memory, but after that it's fine. I wanted to load Feather Linux on the key, but the distribution threw me a shoe. Feather Linux is a distribution of Linux that's small and very suitable for USB keys and CDs. The drives did boot using the Linux, but failed to find certain files needed for further booting and stopped with a kernel panic. It's a work in progress and as such can't be added in this test yet.