Good USB Pen Drive

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Hi there, not sure if this is the right forum, but maybe you guys can help. I'm having some issues with my USB pen at the moment, mostly to do with transfer rates. Vista is only giving me around 500kbps. I've come to the conclusion that the drive is cheap and nasty so was wondering if anyone could recommend a decent one?

I'm not looking for anything massive - 2GB max, 1GB is really all I need. What I want most is speed and reliability. There are so many different varieties out there nowadays that if anyone could shed some light on which models are best, it would be very appreciated.
 
smsmasters said:
Is the Sandisk Cruzer Micro U3 4Gb Readyboost any good?
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I have a 4gb Sandisk Cruzer Micro U3 and a 1 gb corsair voyager (non gt) i prefer the voyager as its more rugged but being the old one its not fast enough for readyboost.

The voyager gt is prob your best bet as it does both fine.
 
helmutcheese said:
Speed and Fast enough timings/delays to meet MS Vista Readyboost specs.
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Really :confused:
I have a non GT here and it's fine for Readyboost.

Andi can vouch for them being water proof as mine has successfully had a full wash cycle and spin, after a few hours in the sun it smelt clean and still worked:o:p:D
 
Thats because 1 or 2 of the non GT's are fast enough (has nothing to do with MB/Sec) you can go to the site someone has put up for Readyboost Ready Drives, most of the non GT's are too slow inc the 2GB I had, and the 16GB is the slowest out them all.

At a guess the 4GB non GT will work.

Also Readyboost can be hacked to work with slower Drives.
 
The Corsair Flash Voyager is quick and according to Vista comes in about 15mb/sec (write) and 22mb/sec (read), the older generation Voyager used to use the same chips as the current GT's and will do readyboost though if you can find one (unlikley). The new GT uses faster chips however is limited at 8GB where as the Voyager is up to 16GB. As for your 'slow' drive appart from the speed of the chips it also comes down to single or dual channel hardware, the problem being most of the larger producers have over time used different. If you want durable the Voyager is pretty good (one reviewer boiled it, froze it, then ran over it with an SUV and it still worked. That said the first 16GB one I had went belly up in inder 2 weeks. The seccond one is still going after a year though.
 
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I use an 8GB Corsair Flash Voyager for moving files around etc.
For Readyboost I use a 4GB Crucial Gizmo Overdrive.

Also as always in these threads I should warn you about Readyboost.
Some people will tell you that there is a "hack" that means you can use any drive with Readyboost.
In other words, you plug your drive in and Vista doesn't give you the option to use the drive as a Readyboost one because basically it has decided the transfer rates are not good enough.
The hack enables you to use said drive for Readyboost anyway.
Whatever you do - don't do this!
Vista has refused to let you use the drive for Readyboost for a reason - it isn't quick enough.
So why force Vista to use it anyway?
All you will do is potentially slow your machine down.
If you plug in a USB flash drive and Vista doesn't give you the option to use it for Readyboost, send it back and buy one Vista does like.
 
Again Readyboost replies on Timings and Delays and Seeks, not overall MB/Sec.

I would not use Hack as a proper ReadyBoost Drive is cheap

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx


" Q: What perf do you need on your device?
A: 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes

Q: My device says 12MB/sec (or 133x or something else) on the package but windows says that it isn't fast enough to use as a ReadyBoost device... why?
A: Two possible reasons:
The numbers measure sequential performance and we measure random. We've seen devices that have great sequential perf, but horrible random
The performance isn't consistantly fast across the entire device. Some devices have 128M of lightning fast flash and the rest of the device is really slow. This is fine for some applications but not ReadyBoost."


http://www.activewin.com/reviews/hardware/memory/vista/readyboost.shtml

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=186
 
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I have a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Readyboost. Once you remove the annoying U3 software and reformat it performs very well.

Build quality isn't too good, but you get what you pay for I suppose
 
I use a 1GB Corsair Voyager (NON GT) for moving stuff about. Been really pleased with it.

Have tried it in 2 Vista running laptops and it offered me the Readyboost option on each one.
 
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