It's significantly more portable than a portable external hard drive.Ĭons: Less than 2 minutes into reformatting the drive for the first time before a benchmark, this Ultra Flair thermal throttled and disconnected.

It's a nicely packaged drive with real aluminum covering most of the drive's body. However, because of the inherently faster random read capability of flash drives, this drive will feel nimbler. Sequential writes could be better, but sequential reads are on par with most portable external hard drives. I get slightly faster boot and loading times on my Windows Vista VM than I do on my MD04ACA. This makes these flash drives as good as (if not better in certain situations) as old fashion hard drives, especially if you're using them as a boot drive or VM drive like I did. Random Write performance is only slightly better by 19% for QD32 and identical at QD1. This flash drive's Random Read performance far exceeds that of a fast SATA platter drive by a factor of 2.6 for QD32 reads and 4.9 for QD1 reads. Random Write 4KiB = 2.2 MB/s (QD32) / 1.8 MB/s (QD1)Ĭompare the Random Read/Write values to a regular 7200rpm hard drive (a Toshiba MD04ACA) Sequential Write = 43 MB/s (QD32 and QD1) Sequential Read = 125 MB/s (QD32 and QD1)

Pros: Still putting it through the wringer, but this Ultra Flair is standing up pretty well to the gamut of small file transfers and running a Windows Vista VM.Īccording to Crystal Benchmark, this flash drive - when plugged into a USB 3.0 port with no other USB devices being used - is capable of

Best 256gb usb 3.0 flash drive 2016