It’s absolutely amazing that flash drives have surpassed the capacity of hard drives from 10 years ago. I mean, you can now attach 10 times more data to your keychain than you could fit into the average Windows 95 PC. Back then, if you were an uber-geek then you MIGHT have a 1GB hard drive, which was barely enough to copy audio CDs at the time.
As our resident industry analyst pointed out in one of his recent articles, data storage is growing exponentially, so the need for portable data storage will only increase. While many retail stores may only have 4 gigabyte drives in the stores, the new 16GB models are now very common, and will soon be the average size at your local Best Buy and Office Depot.
I used to carry around several 4-gigabyte sticks because as a technology and graphics professional I need my files with me at all times. I had one stick for portable applications, one for photoshop files and fonts I use all the time, and of course one to hold all my Atari 2600 and Nintendo emulator ROMs…
Now I can replace all of these sticks with a single USB drive thanks to A-Data’s C702 16GB Flash drive. Not only does it cram 4 DVDs-worth of storage into a little nugget, but is has features to make it ultra-portable and ultra-useful.
Description
Automobiles, furnishings and also clothing reflect your character. So do your USB flash drives, an integral accessory that shows your lifestyle and esthetics, too. For that reason, let A-DATA C702 match your style by its sleek, timeless design.
Elegantly designed for easy use
When consumer electronic intimately connecting to our daily life, the product design certainly does matter. Catching the latest design trend, the new A-DATA C702 flash drive makes a stylish impression in a subtle way. Inspired by minimalism, C702’s retractable USB connector eliminates the need for caps and perfectly protects the connector. A simple clean-cut casing gives it a truly fashionable appearance and makes C702 the classic statement for your digital lifestyle. In addition, A-DATA adds a hook and neck strap for convenience and to prevent loss.
Features
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Requirements
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The drive comes in a small blister packet, similar to every other retail packages… meaning that you have to have a pair of industrial-strength scissors, or a lightsaber to open it. There isn’t alot of extras to the package, as a matter of fact the only thing inside is the drive itself (the paper insert doubles as the product’s manual).
USB drives are so trendy today, that many of them now have interesting designs to distinguish themselves among the sea of silicon. A-data’s C702 has a stylish look that fits in with today’s sleek MP3 players, cell phones, and other gadgets. It is made mostly of white plastic that has a semi-pearl finish to it. The sides of the drive are adorned with shiny chrome-like metal, and the top has a small clear window to let the unit’s blue LED shine through. The back of the plastic has a notch to allow this drive to be easily attached to a keychain (or lanyard if you want to advertise your geekness).
The most interesting feature (which I wish more USB drives had) is a slide-out USB connector! Similar to A-Data’s PD17 drive, the USB connector is hidden within the drive’s base, and a notch on the side slides the full-size USB connector out (like a turtle popping its head out).
When plugged in, the device responds just like any other USB drive. The blue LED doesn’t glow constant when plugged in, and only flashes when there is drive activity. I prefer this setup, as an “always on” USB drive light can be distracting when sitting on my desk. Also, the blue LED isn’t as blinding as other drives that use orange LEDs, which tend to be very bright.
The plastic shell feels good, but also feels a little hollow. I wouldn’t take this drive on a river-rafting or rock-climbing expedition, but is more than adequate for the sedentary lifestyle most geeks enjoy. If you do attach this to your keychain, then it may get scratched and dinged by its metal neighbors, but should be alright.
One thing to note is that this “16-gigabyte” drive has in actuality 15 gigabyte of usable space. This is because of the different standards of what a gigabyte really is (is a kilobyte exactly 1000 bytes or 1024 bytes?). Marketing folks like to exploit this ambiguity to make a drive look bigger than it really is… but everyone does it. Every 16GB drive is only going to have 15GB of usable space… just a fact of life.
To determine a good quality flash drive, you have to look at both its read and write speeds. Most drives don’t have a problem with fast read access, but can be painfully slow when writing; and write speed becomes critically important as the storage size increases.
We tested A-Data’s C702 drive with a decent sample of drives to get a feel for its performance level. We used several “consumer-level” drives and some “enthusiast-level” drives that tout dual-channel flash technology. We tested the drives with the ATTO drive benchmark, as well as HDbench. Below is our test machine:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor
- Asus P5W-DH Deluxe (Intel 975 chipset)
- Asus D2X PCI-E sound card
- 8GB OCZ DDR2-1024 memory
- XFX GeForce 8800GTS video card
- Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
Because of the way flash technology works, drive performance increases with bigger blocks (writing a bunch of very small files will take a lot longer than the same size of 1 huge zip file). ATTO’s benchmark is a good measure of how flash drives scale depending on the block of data being accessed.
ATTO benchmark resutls
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HDBench doesn’t give such a granular result as ATTO, but gives a better idea of “real-world” performance because it shows a single rating for read, write, and copy speeds. This benchmark pretty much agreed with the results found with ATTO.
HDBench benchmark results
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While OCZ’s Rally 2 Turbo drive beat all of the others, it is also the only “enthusiast-level” drive in the group and has dual-channel technology. OCZ’s ATV is a “consumer-level” device, but also supports dual-channel technology, and was only slightly faster than A-Data’s C702 drive (in write speed). When it comes to read speed, the C702 was able to edge out the ATV.
You can analyze the chart all you want, but the big picture is that the C702 is in the middle of the road in terms of read and write performance, and is very good for its class. If you need a higher-performing drive, then you need to step up to the enthisiast level devices (which tend to be alot more expensive). Also keep in mind that your results may differ depending on your motherboard’s chipset, drivers, and OS, but at least these charts demonstrate how each drive performs when compared on equal footing.
As we’ve discovered with other USB drive testing, the throughput varies on your motherboard’s chipset and drivers. During our testing, it became evident that the A-Data C702 16GB drive had better-than-average read speed, but only slightly better-than-average write speed. At around 7MB a second write, it can’t hold a candle to OCZ’s dual-channel Rally2 drive (reviewed here), but is able to pass up OCZ’s ATV drive (which supposedly also sports dual-channel technology). By now, a 6-7 Megabyte write speed should be the bare minimum for flash drives.
The C702 has design features that other manufacturers should implement. I never want to see a flash drive with a lanyard ever again, so the integrated keyring is a welcome sight for today’s portable storage. The retractable USB plug means that there are no caps to lose while still protecting the USB connector. The plastic shell will start to look worn after several months, so a ruggedized coating would be a nice addition.
High-capacity flash drives aren’t as expensive as you might think. Going down the isles of Best Buy or other technology store, you may be left thinking that 16 gigabytes of flash storage must be exhorbidantly expensive. I mean, these stores sell 4GB flash drives for nearly $100! If you look online for 16GB flash drives, you’ll see that most of them range between $50 and $80, and even “performance” models aren’t that much more.
As flash drive capacity becomes more expansive, the write speeds need to increase to keep up. While the A-data C702 16GB drive has a ton of space, the average write speed means that it will take a long time to fill up. You can easily run portable applications on it, but a good dual-channel drive makes portable Photoshop and web browsing much more bearable.
If you plan on writing to the drive alot then you may be more satisfied with a dual-channel model. If you just need to have a lot of information with you at all times, then A-Data’s C702 16GB unit is a great drive for a great price.
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