SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour 8GB Flash Drive

 

 In order to test the performance of the SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour, the following setup was used:

 

 

 

 

For the synthetic benchmarking of the SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour drive, HDTach was used. In addition to these, 1GB of various sized files were transferred to (write) and from (read) the drive with Windows, the times taken was then recorded with a stopwatch. The files were then copied back to the original HDD and the times again recorded. As a comparison, the graphs contain the results obtained with the same tests on a 300GB Maxtor external USB HDD.

 

 

We can see from the HDTach Burst Speed results that there really isn’t a lot separating the flash drive and the mechanical HDD.

 

 

Although the SanDisk Cruzer was able to keep up with the Maxtor USB HDD in burst speed, it suffered against the reference drive in terms of overall average read speed to the tune of 7.5MB/s.

 

 

Random access speeds were very impressive on the flash based SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour. The lack of moving parts in a flash drive is testament to the increased random access performance.

 

 

Both drives sustained exactly the same amount of CPU usage during the HDTach benchmarking. In the grand scheme of things, 5% is more than acceptable.

 

 

During the file transfer benchmarking, the Maxtor 300GB USB external HDD managed to usurp the SanDisk Cruzer Contour, which isn’t surprising in the least. However, the SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour does give a very reasonable account for itself.

 

Let’s head over the page to see how well the Cruzer Contour did as a whole in the conclusion…