Not All Flash Drives Are Created Equal

I recently bought a PHP400 USB Flash Drive at the friendly neighborhood CD-R King. The drive has a capacity of 4GB. Amazing how price has gone down to P100 per GB now on flash drives. I didn't want to go with the generic house-branded CD-R King flash drive so I picked one with a slightly known name -- Ridata. I don't really know the brand well but I've seen it a few times on the blank CD/DVD labels so I took that over the more expensive brands like Kingston, Apacer, etc. I figure all flash drives are more-or-less the same.

Well, after using the Ridata USB flash drive for several weeks, I have to say that it is quite poor in performance as compared to my old Kingston flash drives. Reading and writing is slow. When you drag-and-drop files onto it in Windows Explorer, there's a 1 to 2 second lull where nothing seems to happen before you see the animated files flying between folders to indicate a file transfer.

A Pictureshop customer lent me his 8GB Sandisk USB Flash Drive a few months ago. That one was just fantastic in performance. I'm sure it costs an arm and a leg too.