We tested the performance of the OCZ Mini-Kart 1GB USB Flash Drive, using two well known benchmarking utilities, HD Tach and Sisoft Sandra 2005. All tests were carried out under the WinXP operating system, with a USB 2.0 compatible motherboard (Abit A8N Fatal1ty series).

HD Tach Results

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Despite being ultra thin and lightweight, the OCZ Mini-Kart reported a better performance than Creation's USB stick. As was expected, the OCZ Rally and Memorex Traveldrive reported higher reading and writing transfer rates, but are double and more in size. The OCZ Mini-Kart is designed more for convenience and not for high performance, but it is good nonetheless.

Sisoft Sandra 2005 SR1 Results

Sisoft Sandra has two sets of tests.

The "File system" which tests how your drive(s) and controller(s) compare to other devices in a typical system:

· Read Test: Buffered, Random, Sequential
· Write Test: Buffered, Random, Sequential
· Seek Test

The "Drive Index" mark is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. The Drive Index is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC. A larger number means better performance. The weighting of the results is not equal and represents the distribution of different files sizes as used on these devices (obtained through field research).

The results here indicate good performance, once again better than Creation's stick.

The "Compact Flash" typical usage model for these devices is File operations, such as Writing a file to the device, reading a file from it, and deleting a file. This benchmark exercises the devices in terms of these operations (to measure the “raw” cluster level performance of the device, it is recommended to also test it by means of the File System Benchmark module). The following characteristics are measured for each of the four representative file sizes of 512 Bytes (representing a minimal single data cluster file), 32kB, 256kB and 2MB. The weighting of the results is not equal and it represents the distribution of different files sizes as used on these devices (obtained through field research). For each of the four file sizes, a Combined Index is then calculated, stating the combined performance in terms of Combined Operations Per Second, with respect to a mix of write, read and delete operations.

Combined Device Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the Combined Index figures over the four file sizes. (Higher is better, i.e. better performance).

Endurance Factor: is a figure representing the Wear and Life Expectancy of flash devices; this is obtained by dividing the average performance (normal condition, i.e. sequential write) to the lowest performance (high-stress condition, i.e. same block re-write). It measures the relative improvement of endurance caused by the wear leveling or flash management algorithm; the absolute endurance of a device (i.e. its expected life-time) is directly dependent, in addition to this Endurance Factor, on the nominal manufacturer rating of maximum erase/reprogram cycles, which is typically 100,000+ for SLC and 10,000+ for MLC devices. (Higher is better, i.e. longer life-time for the device)

Good Combined Index results for the OCZ Mini-Kart, which are much better than Creation and close enough to the Memorex stick. The endurance factor is not very high according to SiSoft Sandra 2005, but still better than the OCZ Rally.