{"id":398,"date":"2008-10-08T19:14:54","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T00:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fiveforks.com\/ted\/2008\/10\/lexar_vs_kingston\/"},"modified":"2021-05-25T11:20:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T15:20:48","slug":"lexar_vs_kingston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2008\/10\/lexar_vs_kingston\/","title":{"rendered":"Lexar vs. Kingston"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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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<\/em>) 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) [USBDview results in square brackets]:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Drive<\/th>\nWrite<\/th>\nRead<\/th>\nUSBDview<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Lexar Firefly 512 MB<\/td>\n2.67w<\/td>\n8.61r<\/td>\n[ 2.39w 7.48r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kingston Data Traveler 110 2 GB<\/td>\n6.04w<\/td>\n18.12r<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Corsair Flash Voyager 8 GB<\/td>\n5.17w<\/td>\n22.40r<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
60 GB Archos<\/td>\n0.98w<\/td>\n7.65r<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
20 GB HD Enclosure<\/td>\n7.83w<\/td>\n18.13r<\/td>\n[11.29w 18.06r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Microcenter 4 GB<\/td>\n3.51w<\/td>\n19.13r<\/td>\n[ 2.80w 20.07r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
OCZ Diesel 8 GB<\/td>\n6.62w<\/td>\n19.13r<\/td>\n[ 9.68w 17.56r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Emtec C400 16 GB<\/td>\n9.83w<\/td>\n14.96r<\/td>\n[ 9.14w 15.64r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kingston SE9 16 GB<\/td>\n6.43w<\/td>\n14.02r<\/td>\n[ 6.43w 16.97r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
PNY Attache 4 32 GB<\/td>\n7.45w<\/td>\n27.81r<\/td>\n[ 6.34w 25.82r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Simpletech 320 GB hard drive<\/td>\n22.96w<\/td>\n22.96r<\/td>\n[19.01w 31.82r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
32GB SanDisk removable<\/p>\n22.96w<\/td>\n<\/td>\n[10.81w 21.82r]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Lexar vs. Kingston”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4271,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/4271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}