Performance

Notes: The performance tests took place on an Asus P5WD2-E Deluxe motherboard. Unfortunately I do not have another high speed 2GB flash drive for comparison, but I do have a 512MB Revoltec File Carrier USB 2.0 flash drive which should make a nice comparison between the tests. The older Kingston 128MB drive that I do have was extremely slow compared to the Gizmo! and File Carrier, so I did not include it in the benchmarks.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the above graph

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the above graph

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the above graph

 

HDTach is a benchmarking utility primarily used for benchmarking hard disk drives. But it also works on flash disk drives and can show the theoretical transfer speeds of the flash drive. As you can see, the Gizmo! has a read burst speed of 11.5MB/s, an average read speed of 8.9MB/s and an average write speed of 10MB/s. It is not the fastest drive I have ever seen but still is about 25% faster than the File Carrier in these tests. What makes me wonder is that this is the only flash disk drive that I have ever seen which has a higher write speed than read speed! It can be written faster than it can be read, according to HDTach.

Gizmo

Revoltec

In Sisoft Sandra, the Gizmo! bests the File Carrier in every given way. Especially when accessing small chunks of data, the Gizmo! is many times faster than the File Carrier. Even though this performance gap closes in as the file size gets higher, it can only close in when >2MB files are used, and even so the Gizmo! still wins by a good 35-40% difference. The Gizmo! also has a much higher endurance factor, 19.7 compared to the 14.7 of the File Carrier.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg image of the above graph

As many people suggest, and I agree, flash disk drives are dangerous to compare in synthetic benchmarks, since they may work quite differently in real life. Agreeing to that, I took a 500MB file (unfortunately limited by the capacity of the File Carrier) and measured the time it needed to be copied to the flash disk drive. Here also the Gizmo! took a very clear win, with a time of just over 49 seconds, where the File Carrier needed over 1 minute and 12 seconds.

Final words and conclusion

The new 2GB Gizmo! drive is certainly a very useful device to have. Being 1400 times larger than a floppy disk, much smaller and able to be read/written just like a small hard disk drive are what make it being so versatile. And as USB technology is advancing, I doubt that its capabilities will be reduced to storage, for example considering that most motherboards nowadays support booting from USB devices. More advanced users can easily install entire operating systems inside the Gizmo!. I believe that already there are several Linux distributions made specifically for USB flash drives and many others can be modified to work inside them. This can make the Gizmo! a very nice small hard disk drive for exceptionally small and silent systems, or even a restoration/backup bootable disk. Unfortunately the price per MB is quite high, as you are going to pay for the Gizmo! just as much as a 250GB hard disk drive would cost nowadays. But of course you cannot have a hard disk drive which weights next to nothing, is just as small as your key ring and you can carry around inside your pocket. There are also the 1GB and 512MB versions of the Gizmo! available, which cost considerably less.

My thanks to Gill Smith, Crucial EU, for providing us with a sample of the Gizmo! drive for the needs of this review.