Testing

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Some motherboards have a limit on the speed at which the USB ports can be accessed, and cap them at 25mb/s which is slower than the advertised speed of the Petito. We used the drive on several motherboards with a variety of past and present chipsets (inc 680i) from various manufacturers and the speeds were all the same.

Methodology

To test the USB drive we run several synthetic benchmarks in order to determine the speed of the drive in relation to others in the same environment. The tests that we run are easily repeatable by anyone. Each test is repeated three times and the average taken to ensure accuracy. If one of the tests is wildly different from the rest, all the results are scrapped and retaken. It should be noted that a fresh installation of Windows XP was used to carry out the testing.

First comes SiSoft Sandra Lite XIIc’s removable media test which determines the number of operations per second for varying file sizes, and also the endurance factor of the drive which gives an impression of how long the drive will last.

Next is HD Tune which gives maximum, average and minimum read speeds of the drive, and also the CPU usage along with burst read speed and access speed. HD Tach uses low level hardware drivers in order to bypass any software that may stand between getting the highest transfer speed. By design, this means that the figures shown by HD Tach can never be reached in a real world scenario but is useful when used in conjunction with other benchmarks.

The final test is a real-world test which gives you an example of how the drive performs with a standard file transfer. 900mb of 65 files of varying size is transferred to the drive, and then copied back; giving read and write speeds. This will always be slower than the advertised speed as smaller files take longer than bigger files to transfer, as each small file requires space to be allocated, the file to be transferred, then finished etc. The figure from this test is represented as mb/s by dividing 900 by the amount of time taken.

Results

As you can see from the results, the Petito is oddly the fastest drive in the test line-up. It gets the highest combined index in Sandra, the second highest transfer speed in HD Tune, the fastest write time in our 900mb test, and the second fastest read time beaten by a mere 512kb of the ToughDrive Mini.

Considering its tiny size, this drive sure packs a punch for transfer speeds. I was personally amazed, and quite amused that this tiny drive manages to beat the OCZ ATV Turbo even though it’s much smaller, and still has the same waterproofing feature. Granted it’s not by a huge margin (less than 1 mb/s) but it still comes out on top.

Even more astounding is that the advertised speed of 30mb/s was actually reached, probably a first in this age of spin. Granted it was only seen in the synthetic benchmarks, rather than our 900mb real-world test, but for a large transfer, the drive will easily hit these speeds. Our test saw the drive managing 23.4mb/s write and 24.0mb/s read, both scores are something to be proud of.

The access time of this drive is 0.5ms which puts it at half the required value for ReadyBoost which is a good sign. The faster a USB drive is in this department will determine the overall effect of ReadyBoost, together with the transfer speeds.

In HD Tach this USB stick takes the joint top crown with a speed of 32.8mb/s sequential read. The access time however is half of the OCZ stick at 0.5ms which is exactly the same result as with HD Tune. With two different tests giving very similar results its obvious that this drive is the best of the three tested.

For CPU usage, if you are really worried about the difference between 4% and 7% when copying a file, you need to consider an upgrade soon. The figures are only included for your reference should such things interest.